TikTok’s brief flirtation with playable, in-feed games appears to be over, as the company told us this time last year.
But the idea of a ‘TikTok for games’ won’t go away, and alongside Supercell-backed HypeHype, the category now has a new contender: player-created ‘obby’ app Smirk.
As HypeHype edges closer to a full launch, it appears to be expanding its creative toolset to be capable of richer, Roblox-style games.
New contender Smirk, however, is keeping its offering much more focused. The goal for now is to enable the easy, quick creation of 15-second ‘obbies’, which are easily shareable and playable in the game’s TikTok-style feed.
“Smirk has less power, less fidelity, fewer users, and fewer games than HypeHype, but what we do have is focus,” cofounder Preston Attebery tells us. “Focus on turning our actual friends into game creators by enabling them to adequately express themselves through games. We don’t think its good enough for game creators to just clone hypercasual games from the App Store and put it on our app.”
Attebery and cofounder Josh Bromberg are based in San Francisco, and have raised over a million dollars from Dune Ventures, Lightshed Ventures plus several angels. Smirk is currently in alpha testing on iOS, with an Android build and launch to come further down the road.
“You already have a place to play hypercasual games,” Attebery continues. “You want a new app to show you new content and you want that new content to be made by your actual friends so that it’s relevant and interesting to you. But this is a seriously hard thing to accomplish.”
“This means making our editor so easy to use that our friends can pick up our app, make a little game, and post it for us to enjoy. Making a game has to take literal seconds and by the end of it it’s actually enjoyable to play. Then and only then can a true ‘TikTok for games’ form.”
Attebery is a former product lead at Playbyte, another app that has pitched itself as a ‘TikTok for games’. He also previously worked with artists like the Jonas Brothers, DNCE and several others he “can’t tell us about” during the “celebrity-game craze of 2016”, he tells us.
Attebery founded Smirk in 2021, and programmer, designer and entrepreneur Josh Bromberg joined the startup in early 2022. The duo will focus on getting the attention of US high school age users when the game’s launch rolls around, which is still to be confirmed.
Post-launch, Smirk plans to add support for more game types including shooters, racing games, simulators and multiplayer games as its player base expands.
“Roblox is already proof that people do want to do this, but now it needs to happen on mobile, so even more people can make games no matter where they are or what they’re doing,” adds Attebery.
“We think amazing things happen when anyone can create a game, and we won’t stop until making one is as easy as any other medium.”
