WeChat - the Chinese social media platform - boasts more than 400m monthly active users for its mini-games, it has been revealed.

The figure comes from a presentation by Chinese game analytics firm Gamelook (via GameDev reports), which notes that WeChat also boasts over 1bn users both inside and outside of China. Mini-games for the platform were first released in 2017 in China, and became available worldwide in 2019. WeChat is of course the all-in-one social media, payment and messaging platform that has been dominant in China due to the closed nature of the country’s digital ecosystem.

WeChat boasts the ability to use mini-programs to access everything from video streaming to document sharing, and is used for everything from personal messaging to business relations. Despite being mainly centred in China, WeChat’s user base extends worldwide. It's also possibly the biggest of Tencents holdings, as the company developed the app back in 2011, and it now stands as one of their most well-known products.

Mini-games are massive business

It’s unsurprising that WeChat’s mini-games boast so many players, especially due to the sheer number of users overall. With over 1bn people utilising WeChat for a variety of functions, the fact that they then choose to unwind with one of the games available seems only natural. Of course we’ve already seen, back in 2019, businesses discussing how to capitalise on this, but we’ve also seen other platforms take on the mini-game craze.

TikTok is one such platform to integrate mini-games, trialling them in the UK recently and mainly pushing hypercasual-style titles. For many developers and publishers the question around this new craze is how they can make a living out of it. After all, a mini-game is a very different beast to a full-fledged title on mobile. But with this many users and corresponding sample size, we’ll soon get a sense of whether mini-games are going to be a major challenger, or just a flash in the pan.