Playbyte’s New App: The “TikTok” of Games
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Playbyte’s New App: The “TikTok” of Games
Playbyte is a company that wants to take TikTok’s place as the de facto platform for gamers. The company’s new iOS app includes tools for users to make and share basic games on their phone, as well as a vertically scrollable, fullscreen feed where you can play other people’s games. The feed, like TikTok, gets more personalized over time to show you more of the type of games you enjoy.
Playbyte’s games are created using basic building blocks, emoji, and even pictures from your iPhone’s Camera Roll. The objective is to make game creation a form of self-expression rather than an introductory, educational experience that tries to teach people the basics of coding.
Playbyte’s game development is based on its lightweight 2D game engine, which employs web technologies to allow gamers to develop games that can be quickly loaded and played even on slow connections and older devices. You may like and comment on a game after you’ve finished it by clicking the icons on the right side of the screen, which are very similar to TikTok’s.
Playbyte’s feed updates you to more of the games you liked as the app uses its understanding of in-game imagery, tags, and descriptions, as well as engagement metrics like popularity scores, to recommend additional titles it believes you’ll enjoy.
Users have already created a variety of games with Playbyte’s tools at launch — including simulators, tower defense games, combat challenges, obbys, murder mystery games, and more.
Playbyte is a social media company, not just a games app, according to Playbyte founder and CEO Kyle Russell – previously of Skydio, Andreessen Horowitz, and (disclosure!) Playbyte is meant to be a social media platform rather than simply another game.
“We have this model in our minds for what is required to build a new social media platform,” he says.
“What Instagram did for text, TikTok did for photographs, and Twitter did for video was to marry a constraint with a personal feed,” Russell explains. “Typically [they] began by emphasizing the need to make these experiences brief… So that you may work within the confines of such a short, restricted format, there must be a short, confined style and specialized tools that get you up and running fast.
Playbyte games, like many other online game sites, have their own set of restrictions. In addition to their simplicity, the games are limited to five locations. As a result of this limitation, a style emerged where gamers make games with an intro screen that you must press “play” on, a narrative intro, a challenging gameplay section, and then a story conclusion.
Playbyte is a game development platform that lets you build games with drag-and-drop ease and provides access to a wide range of free resources. In addition, Playbyte allows for the reuse of game assets by other game developers. That means if someone more skilled develops a game asset using customized logic or combines several components together, the rest of the user base may benefit from it.
“We want to make it as simple as possible for anybody who isn’t as ambitious to feel like a productive, creative game developer,” Russell explains. “The key to that will be if you have an idea — for example, the image of a game in your mind — and can quickly search for new assets or link together previously saved pieces. Then simply drop them in and mix-and-match – almost like with Legos – to create something that is 90% of what you had imagined without any further configuration on your part,” he adds.
Playbyte has big goals for its future. In the future, Playbyte intends to monetize its feed with brand advertising, perhaps by allowing producers to insert sponsored items into their games, like as it plans to do with Twitch.tv in the future. It also plans to set up a patronage system at some time in the distant future. It may be either paid memberships or game NFTs that are used here, but this will come later on.
The team had originally begun as a web app in 2019, but at the end of last year, they scrapped that plan and rewrote everything as an iOS native application with its own game engine. After breaching TestFlight’s maximum capacity of 10,000 users, the software went live on the App Store this week.
It’s gaining popularity among younger teenagers who are active on TikTok and other collaborative games like Roblox, Minecraft, or Fortnite. “These are young people who want to develop their own video games but have been scared away by the necessity to code or use more sophisticated tools, or those that simply don’t have a computer at home that allows them access to such software,” Russell adds.
The company also boasts a number of high-profile investors, including $4 million in pre-seed and seed capital from funders including FirstMark (Rick Heitzmann), Ludlow Ventures (Jonathon Triest and Blake Robbins), Dream Machine (formerly Editor-in-Chief at TechCrunch, Alexia Bonatsos), and angels such as Coinbase’s Fred Ehrsam, Oculus’ Nate Mitchell, Twitter’s Ashita Achuthan.
