Beijing (PingWest)- ByteDance, the parent company of embattled TiTok, plans to expand its gaming business scales by adding 1,000 new gaming jobs in the coming year.

According to a new recruitment advertisement posted on Monday, which targets university students, ByteDance is looking to fill 700 business-related positions and more than 200 technical positions with its growing gaming unit. The jobs will mainly fall under the company’s gaming studio Zhaoxi Guangnian Information Technology, which has branches in Beijing, Hangzhou and Shanghai.

Analysts indicated that ByteDance’s move expanding gaming business is intention of diversifying revenue source so that the company is able to induce millions of social media to become paying gamers.

Bytedance’s move into game sector begun in February this year when Douyin, TikTok’s Chinese version, released its first in-app mini game and Jinri Toutiao, Bytedance’s owned news aggregator app had pre-marketed the mini games on its personalized news distribution platform in January.

In October last year, ByteDance is reportedly to set up game development team in five China’s big cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Hangzhou.

In March this year , Bytedance was making a further push into game sector after it has fully controlled Mokun, which is a 3-dimensional (3D) mobile game developer. According to Chinese business data provider Tianyancha, ByteDance acquired a 100 percent stake in Mokun via its subsidiary Beijing Zhaoxi Guangnian Technology. Zhan Lidong, ByteDance’s senior vice-president, became executive chairman and legal representative of Mokun after the acquisition.

ByteDance also secretly set up a new game developing project so called Oasis, and the company has been embarking on a massive recruiting for its Oasis project. According to Late Post, the Oasis project team so far has more than 100 members with a special focus on developing nine demo games.

With 500 million monthly active users (MAUs), Douyin has already gained enough audiences to support its own games, many of Douyin’s users have already seen in-stream ads for games on the video app, which is a popular marketing channel for ByteDance’s mini games and third party game developers.

Though ByteDance has the capabilities including distribution channel, marketing channel, third-party partner, and R&D team to develop its own games, gaming analysts indicate that ByteDance is still far off from being able to compete with the gaming juggernaut like Tencent.

China’s gaming revenue has seen a major boost in recent months, flourished by the stay-at-home arrangement during the Covid-19 outbreak. A recent report released by Tencent Cloud estimates that gaming revenue could reach CNY270 billion in China this year, a 17 per cent year-over-year increase from 2019.