Rise of Western Social Games Good for Japanese Platforms
Social networking is exploding – and we’ll all be feeling the heat for years to come.
Social networking is not new. Before Twitter, Facebook and Google+, there was MySpace and Friendster. In terms of membership and daily traffic, these older sites have been left behind. Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Tumblr and Pinterest have grown due to ease of sharing media.
Social Gaming on Social Networks
The growth of social networking sites has been hand-in-hand with that of social gaming companies like Kabam and Zynga.
Western developers have a lot to learn from the Japanese as the latter have monetized social gaming better. Japanese social gamers are more dependent on their mobile phones with 80% to 90% paying through phone bills.
Japanese Social Gaming on Social Networking Platforms
The Japanese social game market, like the social networking landscape is very insular. That said, Japan-based firms such as GREE and DeNA have been slow to export social games. GREE has teamed up with OpenFeint DeNA has also only recently launched games for the iPhone and iPad in the United States.
A recent trend has seen GREE and DeNA add social games from outside Japan into their domestic offerings. Their expansion strategy seems to be one of consolidation and saturation of the local market with their current war chests. It is almost as if they are preparing for a foreign invasion led by Android and iOS mobile phones and devices.
Even if foreign developers can take good advantage of Android and iOS in Japan, they will still need considerable help to succeed there. This might be achieved via partnership with GREE and DeNA’s, making use of their existing infrastructure to market and monetize games.
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About the Guest Author:
Rodolfo Lentejas, Jr. is a fulltime freelance writer based in Toronto. He is the founder of the PostSckrippt, a growing online writing business dedicated to producing top quality, original and fresh content. To know more about him, please visit www.postsckrippt.ca. Like him on Facebook or follow him on Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest.
