After more than two years of twists and turns, ByteDance finally sold Mofun Technologies for over $6 billion!

“Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily” March 20 News (Reporter Huang Xinyi) ByteDance has reached a final agreement to sell Pico Technology with Savvy Games Group, which is under the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund (PIF). The sale price is more than $6 billion.

According to people familiar with the matter, ByteDance has made heavy investments in the AI direction. In Q4 2025, its overall profit declined. The sale of Pico is seen as a signal that ByteDance is further strategically focusing on AI.

Pico CEO Zhang Yunfan, meanwhile, released an internal letter to staff, saying that the company and Savvy have recently signed an agreement, and both sides will complete the transaction within a certain period in the future. After the transaction is completed, Pico will become Savvy’s wholly owned subsidiary. At the same time, Pico’s management structure will remain unchanged, and Pico will still be a company headquartered in Shanghai. Zhang Yunfan will continue to serve as Pico CEO, and, together with the management team, will keep leading the company forward. After the transaction is completed, based on historical performance contributions, multiple incentive plans will be provided to Pico employees, including accelerating the vesting and payout of certain long-term incentives granted in the past.

News that ByteDance planned to sell Pico first surfaced as early as November 2023. At the time, it was reported that ByteDance was seeking to sell its game company Pico Technology for a price no lower than $5 billion, and hired Goldman Sachs as a financial adviser to help find and approach potential buyers.

As for the news that Pico would be sold, Pico’s former CEO Yuan Jing had responded publicly within the company, saying that Pico would continue to operate independently and would remain deeply focused on the gaming industry for the long term.

After that, in 2024, ByteDance shelved its plan to sell Pico Technology and appointed the new CEO Zhang Yunfan to replace Yuan Jing. Zhang Yunfan previously worked at companies including NetEase, Huanju Times, and Perfect World, and he served as President of Games at Perfect World.

After Zhang Yunfan took office as CEO, ByteDance at one point planned to package Pico and Chaoxi Guangnian together as a whole, with the intent to prepare for an independent listing of its gaming business.

However, by November 2025, ByteDance restarted the plan to sell Pico. Savvy has been in contact with ByteDance, and negotiations are underway regarding the acquisition of ByteDance’s wholly owned subsidiary Pico Technology.

In January 2026, it was reported that the transaction between the two sides had been signed. However, ByteDance denied this. Still, people close to Pico told reporters of “Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily” that in fact the negotiations had gone very smoothly as early as December 2025.

Since 2019, ByteDance has aggressively moved into the gaming business, and it was once widely seen in the industry that it would go head-to-head with Tencent.

In 2019, ByteDance acquired Shanghai Moqiong (rights protection) subsidiary of 37 Interactive (via rights protection) for 110 million yuan and set it up as 101 Game Studio. In the same year, Chaoxi Guangnian was established, initially as ByteDance’s game publishing and production institution, and in February 2021 it was officially set as the game brand name.

The acquisition of Pico Technology was also one part of ByteDance’s overall layout for its gaming business. In March 2021, ByteDance announced that it would acquire Pico Technology in full. This acquisition cost ByteDance 10 billion yuan in cash and 15 billion yuan worth of equity, for a consideration of approximately $4 billion.

But starting in 2022, ByteDance made multiple downsizing and adjustment moves to its in-house gaming business. In mid-2022, the 101 Game Studio located in Shanghai was determined to be shut down.

On November 27, 2023, shortly after reports that ByteDance’s gaming company Pico Technology was seeking an acquisition surfaced, ByteDance announced that its gaming business, Chaoxi Guangnian, would undergo large-scale business contraction—seeking to divest games that had already launched and were performing well while ensuring operations; for projects that had not yet launched, aside from a small number of innovative projects and related technology projects, they would all be shut down.

“ByteDance’s gaming business has finally stopped wavering.” Li Wenyan, a veteran gaming industry analyst, commented on the matter, saying, “Personally, I compare the AI business to an AI operating system, and games are just an AI agent—and not an AI agent with a key role. Compared with the AI business, which has a bigger outlook, games are only a small business.”

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