Following discussions first reported on earlier this year, ByteDance has agreed to sell its games unit Moonton to Savvy Games Group for $6 billion. Moonton is known for mobile titles popular in Asia like Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, which has been downloaded 1.5 billion times. The transaction is set to be finalized in the "near future," according to an internal memo from Moonton's CEO seen by Bloomberg. 

ByteDance has been winding down its gaming arm and shopping Moonton since 2023, just two years after it first acquired the developer. Around that same period, the TikTok parent was shuttering its Nuverse gaming arm, which published notable titles like Marvel Snap and Ragnarok X: Next Generation. The company has since shifted its focus to AI, competing with Chinese rivals to develop chatbots and foundational models. 

Savvy Games, which is owned by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF), has been going in the opposite direction. Last year the company (via its subsidiary Scopely) acquired Pokémon Go developer Niantic for $3.5 billion. PIF was also among the key investors that purchased Electronic Arts in a blockbuster $55 billion deal last year. The Saudi fund holds a 7.5 percent stake in Nintendo as well.  

The sale is the latest chapter in the recent gaming industry consolidation that saw around 45,000 jobs lost in a brutal three-year period between 2022 and 2025. According to a recent GDC study, one-third of US video game industry workers were laid off over the last two years. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/bytedance-is-selling-its-moonton-game-unit-to-savvy-games-for-a-cool-6-billion-124131595.html?src=rss

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© Steve Dent for Engadget

Rivian and Uber have entered into a major partnership, with the former to provide the latter with 50,000 robotaxis in a deal worth $1.25 billion in funding. This starts with Uber purchasing 10,000 Rivian R2 robotaxis, which will be deployed in San Francisco and Miami by 2028.

If all goes well, Uber will scoop up 40,000 more robotaxis by 2030. The company plans to scale the initiative to 25 major cities by 2031. The full $1.25 billion investment is contingent on several autonomous milestones, according to a report by Yahoo Finance. However, Uber has already committed $300 million as an initial investment, though this is subject to regulatory approval.

The announcement actually caused Rivian's stock to surge by ten percent before settling down to around four percent. This speaks to optimism surrounding the deal, given that just about every other stock is on the downswing at the moment due to certain geopolitical concerns.

This isn't Uber's only partnership for this type of thing. It's a giant company with robotaxi hands in a number of cookie jars. The rideshare platform recently unveiled its own in-house robotaxi fleet, which is a design partnership with Lucid and Nuro.

It also announced a partnership with NVIDIA to develop software-driven autonomous vehicles, which will begin deployment in Los Angeles and San Francisco by the first half of 2027. Uber even teamed up with Waymo to bring robotaxis to cities like Atlanta and Austin.

As for Rivian, the company is slowly but surely becoming the "cool" American EV maker, a position once held by Tesla. It just announced pricing and availability for the long-anticipated R2 electric SUV. It arrives this spring, with a starting cost of $58,000. A cheaper model is expected to go on sale in 2027.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/transportation/evs/rivian-will-provide-50000-robotaxis-to-uber-in-a-deal-worth-125-billion-153856638.html?src=rss

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© Rivian