Why Japanese Social Networks Are Best for Social Gaming
Stop press! The social gaming community needs to look at the large social gaming markets of Japan, South Korea, and other Asian countries. And user acquisition strategies on Japanese social gaming networks make for essential reading!
Western social gaming user acquisition methods
Western social gaming companies’ user acquisition engines leave us puzzled as to how they acquire new users. Rather than attracting gamers based on relevance, they rely too much on giving users incentives to invite friends. There are two fundamental problems:
- The common user acquisition engine relies heavily on cross promotion among games. This strategy relies on making one hugely popular social game and then having that game’s audience play other games advertised heavily. Unfortunately, a botched release or unforeseen circumstance can affect revenues significantly, also making it harder to recover in the long run.
- These games rely on going viral – on users inviting their friends. For example, a game will give a player in-game items, more play time, or faster leveling as a reward for inviting pals. However, virality is not the same as word-of-mouth advertising, seldom leading to sustainable gains over the long term due to its impersonal nature.
The methods listed above are entirely dependent on a social network. Using another network’s growth to advance your particular product is a common practice, but can backfire if your company is not helping the network that is providing your growth. For example, PayPal was helped tremendously by the growth of eBay, and YouTube’s initial growth could not have happened without MySpace. In both cases, PayPal and YouTube provided value for members of the underlying network.
How Japanese social network platforms are different
Japanese social gaming networks like DeNA’s Mobage Town (Mobage for short) and Gree are not based on real identities, meaning people are more likely to send out mass invites and cross promotion is actually welcome. Japanese social network platform models have always been mobile. Whilst many Western platforms treated social gaming as an afterthought, forward-thinking networks like Mogage and Gree provide users with a mobile gaming experience and a community of like-minded fellow gamers.
Our Japanese Social Gaming Clients
While increased traffic resulting from publicity on major portal sites and PR campaigns is welcomed, heavy server load generated by sudden increases can cause site delays or crashes for game operators. This represents not only decreased customer satisfaction but missed business opportunities.
A number of our customers are highly successful Japanese social gaming companies who choose our cloud hosting platform due to its flexible expansions and contracts. Our system allows them to automatically increase and decrease the number of virtual machines and server resources depending on traffic, according to the random timing of visitors.
Learn more about the high availability functions of our Cloud Hosting.
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About the Guest Author:
Nida Rasheed is a freelance writer and owner of an outsourcing company, Nida often finds herself wanting to write about the subjects that are closest to her heart. She lives in Islamabad, Pakistan and can be found on Twitter @nidarasheed.
