BEIJING, December 20 (TMTPost)— Bilibili Inc., the leading video sharing platform in China denies talks about cutting in-house games.

Credit：Visual China

The user of Chinese social and dating app Momo revealed last week that Bilbili would axe all of the games the company are developing. During this adjustment, Bilibili will only remain some of its self-developed games that are still in operation, while all the projects that have not yet been launched will be shut down, an anonymous person told Chinese news media outlet 36Kr. Bilibili then responded to 36Kr that the recent talks about its gaming unit are untrue and it just made adjustment on some of game projects.

Two months before the talks swirled, Bilibili announced to disbanded its gaming office in Guangzhou, which was derived from takeover of a studio called Xinyuanhudong in March 2022 for RMB800 million. Bilibili has already invested in almost 20 gaming companies and expanded its in-house gaming team to 1,000 members, with 16 projects for new titles up to date. However, Bilibili is still lack of traction from new game titles. The video and gaming platform suddenly announced removal of  Uma Musume Pretty Derby from Apple’s App Store and Android stores on September 7, only a week after it launched the Chinese version of the hit Japanese game. The game, created by Cygames,  was debuted in 2021 in Japan and raked in about US$1 billion that year.

Bilibili said over one million domestic players had pre-registered before the official launch. It left no specific reason for the removal but the need for technical upgrades. On an earnings conference with analysts, Bilibili executives didn’t disclose when the title can be relaunched at the earnings call and said they will conduct minor content refinement and technical upgrade as soon as possible and bring the game back to the App store. The company has changed its criteria for a successful new game and focus on long-term operations, the highest rank in the market and the return on investment (ROI), so it has been reviewing and adjusting in-house development projects to follow the new key criteria, according to the management. Bililibi CEO Chen Rui told analysts his company has closed some of in-house game projects for they are not profitable if these developing games release.

Bilibili’s denial came on the heels of another Chinese internet leader ByteDance Ltd decided to retreat from gaming after two ambitious years. Nuverse, a game developing and publishing brand under ByteDance, will significantly scale down its business, look for divestiture of existing titles with good performance while maintaining operation, and shut down all of unreleased titles except few innovative projects and related technology projects, ByteDance confirmed to TMTPost App late November.

Nuverse told TMTPost it does have restructure and business adjustments to focus more on some of new types of games and exploration of relevant technologies. The ByteDance subsidiary set up in 2021 said it will continue work well on operation games already launched to fully protect the rights and interests of players.

ByteDance and Nuverse didn’t specify how many employees will be affected during the restructure. They didn’t respond to queries about future of Shanghai Moonton Technology Co.,  and another gaming unit C4games. Prior to ByteDance’s confirmation, Reuters’ sources last month said the TikTok parent will seek to divest from titles already launched.  Bloomberg the same day reported ByteDance plans to several lay off hundreds of staff in gaming and phase out Nuverse. The company was reported to wind down projects under development and consider sales of existing titles. It was also weighing sales of Moonton, a studio it took over for US$4 billion in 2021, according to the report.