Korean game studio SundayToz was founded by three friends, Kevin Lee Jungwoong, Hyunsoo Im, and Chanseok Park in 2008. Not many people may know SundayToz but I believe quite a bit of people, especially in Korea, should know about Anipang which is a hit game on the Kakao game platform, commanding a combined 12 million monthly active users (MAU) for Anipang and Anipang Mahjong. SundayToz is backed by Softbank Ventures Korea and Walden International.

Founded in 2008, the founders (while each on a full-time job) met every Sunday at a place called Toz to develop social games. As the three founders established a proper company for their venture in January 2009, it became natural to name it SundayToz. Seeing the opportunity to set up a gaming empire in Korea, SundayToz started out to publish games on Cyworld App Store. Anipang was one of the first web based social games to launch on Cyworld in 2009 which saw them getting about 450,000 users. But it didn’t take off until it was on the Kakao Games platform. Angus Lau, who is the global vice president said:

While not the first game published on Kakao, we were the first to integrate Kakao’s social features and as a result, the game and its popularity spread like wildfire.

The story behind how Kakao actually got into games is interesting. Kevin envisioned that friends and family were able to play games and connect on mobile through their address book. With the rise of KakaoTalk in Korea, it became a perfect platform to realize Kevin’s vision. Kevin shared this idea with Kakao which eventually gave birth to the Kakao Games Platform. While it is undoubtedly a popular game in Korea, Anipang was also played outside of the country. Interestingly, one of the reasons why Anipang became popular outside of Korea was due to the rise of Kpop. Angus told me:

For much of last year, there was a huge growth in Southeast Asian markets and markets where Kpop was extremely popular. There were a number of Korean Kpop bands, idols, athletes, variety TV show hosts who played the game and later posted to their Twitter and in turn read by their followers around the world. The viral growth through those social media channels helped us grow organically early on outside of Korea.

(Read also: How KakaoTalk Grew From a Startup to a Giant Mobile Platform)

Moving forward, SundayToz plans to work on new titles for KakaoTalk. For its hit game, Anipang, the team plans to go into the merchandising business in Korea and later bring it to Japan and Taiwan before looking at Southeast Asia.

On March 2013, Anipang was ranked the seventh biggest revenue-making game on Google Play by App Annie, ahead of NHN’s Line Pop and DeNA’s Blood Brothers.

Singaporean startup incubator Fatfish Medialab has made its first ever investments in four local startups. The new program, a spin-off from the VC firm Fatfish Group that operates around Southeast Asia, has opted to back these guys, who are all still in beta and not yet fully launched:

PeeplePass

Once launched on iPhone and Android, PeeplePass promises to be Asia’s first data-driven social travel app, different to the usual travel diary or search apps.

Blazable Studio

Blazable Studio is working on a game engine to simplify the creation of social mobile games.

VDancer

VDancer is a game studio focuses on a particular niche – what it promises will be a new genre of mobile dance games.

DockPHP

Will be a SaaS business for creating business-oriented websites.

Fatfish is an iJAM-approved incubator. For those who missed the news, iJAM is a tiered funding program created by the Media Development Authority (MDA) of Singapore. It has experienced entrepreneurs and seasoned investors onboard to guide the startups, such as partners Chow Yen-Lu and Lau Kin Wai.

Mr. Lau says in today’s announcement:

We have quite an exciting first quarter of the year with the investments we made into the four startups. We are selective in finding the right startups to invest in, but we do see a very active startup scene in Singapore. At this juncture, we believe that we will be investing into more than 15 startups over the next 24 months.

China, which is crowded with numerous third-party Android app stores, isn’t generating any game revenue on Google Play since its payment system doesn’t work there. iOS game revenue in China looks healthy, though. Junde said that iOS 6, which is packed with Chinese features, has encouraged many Chinese iOS users to update its devices and in process lose their jailbreak which causes revenue on iTunes to increase.

In Japan, though, the iOS news was less impressive; game revenue from iPad isn’t great, which came to many as a surprise. In fact, only the US generates huge revenue from games on iPad.

In terms of revenue per download, no one is even near Japan’s figures which recorded $1.83 and $1.89 on iOS Games and Google Play respectively. Junde suspects that Singapore’s high iOS revenue per download figure was encouraged by the nation’s recent addiction to the game Candy Crush.

The top publishers based on game revenue on both iOS and Google Play include a number of Asian game publishers including Gungho, NHN, WeMade, GREE, and DeNA. Interestingly, Japan’s Gungho only has eight and nine applications on iOS and Android respectively, but is doing better in terms of revenue compared to GREE and DeNA, which both have hundreds of applications published on both platforms.

Gungho has done extremely well recently thanks to hit game Puzzle and Dragons which is the top revenue game for iOS and Android in March 2013. On Google Play, Asian games are also well represented, with games including Puzzle and Dragons, Anipang, Line Pop, and Blood Brothers hitting the charts.

It’s a pity that we can’t embed the entire deck into this post but we thank App Annie for the permission to include some of the slides for our readers.

Indonesian game studio Tinker Games releases its flagship game Inheritage: Boundary of Existence today for iOS. The one thing that excites me about the game – besides the fact that it has ample amount of Indonesian characteristics inside – is the game’s size, which is 400MB. I’ve seen my share of Indonesian mobile games so far, and there aren’t a lot of huge and complex games such as this coming from the country. Let’s see how the game’s features justify its size.

As the Tinker Games team describes it, Inheritage is a horizontal shoot’em up adventure game that combines Indonesian culture, anime-style artwork, and a visual novel. It’s aimed at a global gaming audience. The game includes Indonesian cities as the backgrounds for the stages, local urban stories, and traditional weapons. The team has put an Inheritage encyclopedia inside to help explain about the various Indonesian artefacts that appear inside the game.

Of course, for a game with that kind of size, Inheritage offers a few other gaming features and details inside. For example, the game is equipped with spoken dialogue in the Indonesian language (though the whole game is playable in English), and players will be able to unlock special attacks and animal partners called Rakyans. You’ll also want to check out the game’s artwork.

Tinker Games is cooperating with local developer Touchten in promoting a few of its games. Inheritage is available as a ‘lite’ version here, or you can buy the full version for $3.99 here. The game studio is offering a 50 percent discount for the game this week only.

Some crazy things happen in the world of Chinese gaming. Rather than giving each its own article, from now on we’ll be trying to do a semi-weekly roundup of the craziest stories so that you can find all the madness in one place. Here’s what went down this week.

Chinese Model Battles Japanese Porn Star Sola Aoi for the Hearts of Chinese Nerds

How do you win the hearts of China’s otaku community? Step 1: Be super hot. Step 2: Pose naked with a giant rubber duck. That’s the approach Chinese model/actress Gong Yuefei took for the photo shoot pictured above, which she said in an interview is part of her campaign to eclipse porn star Sola Aoi in the, ahem, hearts and minds of China’s gaming community. Gong says that as a homegrown “Calabash Baby” she should easily be able to defeat foreign “Ultraman” Sola Aoi.

Unfortunately for Gong, her ploy to play to the hometown crowd seems to be a bit too on the nose, and in the comments on QQ games several readers point out that it was porn videos, not sexy photo shoots, that originally won Sola Aoi the adoration of Chinese gamers. And while Gong’s photo shoot is pretty damn porny (so much so that the link below is probably NSFW), she can’t go so far as to do actual porn because that’s illegal in China.

(via QQ Games)

Gamer Attacks Owner, Police After Being Told He Can’t Live in Internet Cafe

Mr. Wang was on a gaming binge, and after three or four days straight in an internet cafe in Shanghai, taking naps by putting his head on the desk, he apparently figured why not just cut to the chase and set up shop permanently? He left and came back a few hours later with a pillow, comforter, and some daily necessities in hand, intending to become a more permanent fixture in the cafe. The manager, concerned that this would drive away other customers, immediately stopped him and asked him to take his sleep breaks in a local motel rather than on his keyboard.

Wang wasn’t into that idea, and immediately began arguing with the manager. The argument escalated to a shouting match, and then a physical fight as Wang began to hit the manager in the head with his fists. The manager fled to call the police and Wang went back to his game, but when the police arrived, they too suggested that Wang couldn’t live in the internet cafe, starting another argument. Wang refused to cooperate, and when an officer told him that if necessary, they could bring him by force to the local police station for questioning, Wang grabbed the man’s scrotum (seriously, you can’t make this stuff up) and pinched it, causing a minor injury.

Needless to say, the police subdued Wang and brought him back to the station for questioning. Ultimately, a judge decided that due to the injury he had caused during his attack on the police, Wang should be formally arrested. Luckily for Wang, he won’t need to carry around his pillow and comforter anymore — I’m pretty sure the prison will provide that free of charge.

(JusticeNet via QQ Games)

Gamer Fakes Kidnapping to Cover Up Card Overdraft

Earlier this month, Chongqing police were utterly baffled by a kidnapping case they just couldn’t seem to figure out. Over the course of a ten-day kidnapping that apparently involved taking the victim to an ATM and forcing him to withdraw cash, the kidnappers somehow managed to completely avoid appearing in any surveillance camera footage.

Ultimately, it turned out that this was because they actually didn’t exist. 23-year-old gamer Liu — the supposed victim of this kidnapping — had gone on a binge playing an online game called Shen Wu, and after charging 6000 RMB ($952) in the game and withdrawing another 6000 RMB for life expenses, Liu discovered to his horror that he now had an overdraft of nearly $2,000. He didn’t have the money to repay this on his own — he’d been skipping work to play the game — so he knew his only option was to go to his parents. But he also knew they wouldn’t be pleased to learn he’d blown so much on a computer game, so he invented the kidnapping story.

He didn’t expect that his mother would drag him to the police station and force him to report it, but that’s exactly what she did. And Liu’s rather specific story, which implicated a classmate named “Li Hongwei” in the crime and ended with Liu’s daring nighttime escape on May 12, fell apart under the scrutiny of a sustained police investigation. Needless to say, Liu is now in police custody.

(Chongqing Morning Post via QQ Games)

A week later, that question remains unanswered, as GREE’s proposed settlement has left many employees unsatisfied. One worker told the Beijing Times that part of the problem is that many employees put in massive amounts of overtime with the expectation that this dedication would be rewarded in the long run, and that GREE’s compensation plan doesn’t account for that. But a company spokesman told the paper that dissatisfied employees were a small minority of the total staff at GREE China.

But the real trouble for GREE from a PR perspective is that one of the laid-off employees is eight months pregnant. According to her, the loss of her job means the loss of access to pregnancy insurance she’s been paying into for ten years in addition to a maternity leave allowance, and GREE executives and the company’s lawyer have reportedly said they will not be offering her any additional support. (We’ve contacted GREE to see what they say about this and will update this post when we hear back from them). The woman says she has already filed a labor dispute with the relevant authorities in Beijing. A Beijing-based lawyer told the Beijing Times that GREE’s refusal to offer her additional support may violate Chinese labor laws, which make it difficult to terminate the contracts of pregnant women without offering significant additional compensation.

Whatever GREE ultimately decides (or is forced by the law) to do, the report has already damaged the company’s reputation. On weibo, the pregnant woman’s story has been reposted hundreds of times, and almost all the comments are in support of her rather than the company. It’s hard to believe that GREE couldn’t have seen this coming.

Frankly, whatever the law says shouldn’t matter much one way or the other; GREE stepping up to help out this woman ought to be a no-brainer, and I expect we’ll see it do that soon. Even if the law is on your side, it’s never good to bully a pregnant woman, and if paying for one birth and some extra months of maternity leave is what it takes, then GREE should just chock that up as part of the cost of shutting down its China office rather than trying to fight it in the legal system (and destroying its own reputation in China in the process).

(Beijing Times via Sina Tech)

UniPin is a four-year-old Indonesian payment startup that aims to make payment for online games easier. It has around 30 staff working on UniPin, more than 100 games on its platform, and around 300,000 monthly active users who utilize it to buy gaming credits. Unipin is also able to draw strength from the exclusive partnership it established in its starting year with Indomaret, Indonesia’s largest chain of more than 6,000 minimarts, as points of sale for UniPin credits.

UniPin co-founder Ashadi Ang said:

The co-founders are online gamers ourselves and we understand the pain of buying game credits with vouchers in Indonesia. Previously, every game publisher had their own unique vouchers that they put in cybercafes for sales. This resulted in cybercafes selling many different types of vouchers from various publishers. The voucher is a physical good and cybercafes can’t keep too much stock. As a result, the problems of stocks running out and getting the right voucher for the right game at the value you want became a common pain point among gamers.

UniPin’s partnership with over 6,000 minimarts solves that problem by making gaming credits easily available throughout Indonesia. Gamers need just go to the minimarts and tell the cashier staff the amount of credit they want to purchase, make their payment, and they will be issued a receipt with unique codes which they need enter into their UniPin account to top up their credits. This effectively removes stocking issues and gamers can buy any amount they want.

On the game publishers front, UniPin will work with any game publisher to have UniPin’s payment API plugged into their game. Gamers can then use UniPin for any in-game purchase. This effectively solves the issue of too many types of gaming vouchers being offered by different game publishers, and it also allows the publishers to do what they are best at: making and publishing good games.

UniPin is also actively looking to get more game publishers to use its payment channel. In the near future, Ashadi shared that UniPin is looking to enable purchase of credit through ATM and bank transfer.

Earlier in the month, MOL Points, a new entrant to Indonesia with similar services, announced a collaboration with Alfamart, Alfamidi and Lawson, another chain of minimarts in Indonesia. It is worth noting that Indomog, another key player in this business of selling of gaming credits through physical stores has similar partnership with Alfamart, Alfamidi, Lawson, Carrefour and 7-Eleven in Indonesia. With more payment companies helping to make game credits easily available to end users, it only spells good news for game developers and publishers who long had difficulties monetizing their content.

Developed by Japanese gaming company DeNA, Blood Brothers is a popular mobile game that has hit number one place in 33 countries. It is also a mobile game played across most parts of the world except for China, Africa, and Japan.

Tetsuya Mori, managing director of DeNA’s Singapore office, said at today’s Casual Connect conference in Singapore that Blood Brothers is an important case study for developers because it is one of the few games that has won without special device leverage (like Nintendo had in the past) or a Japan-first success (like Rage of Bahamut). Mr. Mori added:

Blood Brothers is interesting because we didn’t even release the game in Japan. We just released the game in the global market and won the world. For that reason, it matters to us [game developers].

While most Japanese game publishers know how to make money in their local market, Mori says that not many know how to repeat the success in the global market. So what is the reason for Blood Brothers‘ success? Mori explains that in-game events have made the major difference.

The secret sauce: Games inside a game

As explained by Mori, events are “games inside a game.” They are usually set within a limited time and gives players rare items. Such in-game events usually double the average revenue per user (ARPU). Examples of an event could be a player versus player (PvP) event, boss raid, or special dungeon mission. Understanding that events are important, Mori shared five key design points on planning an event:

1. Leader-board: A way to spur gamers to climb the ranking ladder.
2. Separation into groups: To create a sense of belonging among gamers. But sometimes a group too big doesn’t provide that sense of belonging. “Divide the pyramid small enough so that players feel they have control,” says Mori. He also shared that a 10-person pyramids are what DeNA finds most effective for Blood Brothers but the team keeps evaluating and optimizing the group based on data they find.
3. Incentivizing effort: Blood Brothers gives one point for the first reward and provides increasing returns of points as users get higher.
4. One day, one match: Developers shouldn’t do events too frequently to ensure that events stay fresh and exclusive. Don’t make gamers exhausted.
5. Rewarding effort: Top players usually feel comfortable being at the top of the pyramid. To keep them working, Blood Brothers provides negative incentive from time to time to keep them on their toes.

Mori also shares the “five don’ts” when designing Blood Brothers:

• Don’t play, get lost.
• Don’t get players overwhelmed.
• Don’t get them bored.
• Don’t get them exhausted.
• Don’t let top players feel too secure and comfortable.

Actively managing games as a service

Mori says that a lot of game developers see a game as a product and leave it there once it is developed. But for DeNA, it is all about actively managing games as a service. “[A game] is art, yes, but it is more science than art,” said Mori (see slide 13).

Part of the work for Blood Brothers is done at DeNA Hanoi, the Vietnamese branch formed through the Punch Entertainment team it acquired 18 months ago. He ended his keynote saying:

Tokyo HQ studios rely more and more on the Hanoi studio. We have another
game called History Attacks. Just through this experience, we are making active transfer of our core competency to Southeast Asia. Not only in Hanoi, but we also set up a studio in Singapore.

UPDATE: To make it clear, Blood Brothers is available in China (on mobage.cn and mobage.tw) and Africa (on Mobage West Network)

Indonesian game developer Touchten today released a soccer app for Android that’s proving to be quite a head turner. This soccer game is quite special because it is developed together with legendary Brazilian footballer Zico. For those who don’t know who that is, Zico is the 1980s equivalent of Cristiano Ronaldo. Zico has also made a name for himself in Japan, earning the nickname “God of Soccer” there.

The brand-new game, which is titled Zico, is a casual 3D free kick game that also tells the story of Zico’s footballing career. There are three big stages inside the game located in Brazil, Italy, and Japan, countries where Zico played professional football. For now the only available stage is the first one, with Italy and Japan being released later.

How did an Indonesian game developer get the chance to work with Zico? Touchten CEO Anton Soeharyo said that they were introduced to NDV Consulting’s Fernando Vasconez by a Singaporean friend. They had chemistry straight away and immediately agreed on the deal. The Zico game is made in collaboration with Brazil’s 213 Sports.

During the game launch today, Zico has also made a video greeting to Indonesian soccer fans, particularly those from Indonesia’s largest online community Kaskus, which is Touchten’s launch partner. The game itself will be heavily promoted by Zico in his home country Brazil, including during Brazil’s Confederations Cup, World Cup 2014, and Olympics 2016.

The game will be pre-installed on eight to 10 million mobile devices in Brazil in preparation for the sporting bonanza in the country in the next few years. Zico is first launched in the Japanese market in commemoration of the 20 year anniversary of the J-League.

Anton said at today’s launch event that he wants to show that Indonesians can do something on the global stage. He thanked everyone including Zico and the other Brazilian partners for making this project come true. The Touchten team is actively pursuing other intellectual property products with famous people like Zico.

Zico comes at a price of US$0.99 on Android. You can download it on Google Play. The iOS version will come soon.

The new page asks players “How else can you play an FPS?” and then presents them with a eight this-or-that voting options, each relating to a particular element of gameplay design. The percent of votes each option has accrued is prominently displayed, and while the site doesn’t explicitly say so, it certainly implies that the higher-voted options will be implemented into the game.

If Netease really plans to abide by these votes — we’ve contacted the company for comment — then I believe this will be the world’s first FPS from a major development studio to crowd-source such huge aspects of its game design. It’s a bold move, and one that likely means we won’t be seeing this game anytime soon, as based on these questions it seems like the game must be in a very early phase of development.

So what choices are gamers being given, and what are they choosing so far? The page has only been up for a day, but it appears to have already attracted thousands of votes, resulting in these choices:

Aim-assist vs. pure skill: Here, 83.69 percent of respondents so far have voted for having some degree of aim-assist to make shooting more precise. This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise as many modern shooters including Call of Duty and Battlefield have aim-assist mechanisms so that aiming is not 100 percent manual.

Progressive characters vs. static characters: Here, players are pretty torn, with 45.67 percent voting for progressive characters that can be leveled-up, specialized, and personalized, and 54.32 percent voting for static characters whose only differences are their external appearances (which makes the game fairer in multiplayer matches).

Responsive maps vs. static maps: Players overwhelmingly (89.09 percent) prefer responsive maps that may change over the course of gameplay (for example, a hole gets blown in a wall or a building collapses).

Story-based single player vs. arcade-style single player: When asked whether they preferred a single player mode with characters and a story or an arcade-style single player mode that just focuses on fun carnage, voters so far definitely prefer the game to tell a story (87.71 percent).

Large-scale battles vs. small-scale battles: Do players want Battlefield style engagements, with huge maps, vehicles, and long range engagements, or Call of Duty style smaller maps that are more focused on speed and foot battles? Voters so far prefer the former (82.74 percent).

Varied actions vs. traditional actions: Players have thus far indicated that they’d prefer playable characters to have varied actions (running, crouching, walking, creeping, assassinations, etc.), rather than have a game with fewer actions that’s more focused on pure speed and skill (83.9 percent to 16.09 percent).

Character classes vs. All-around warriors: Voters are split on whether they want different character classes with different skill sets (for example, a medic whose stats are geared towards healing, a heavy whose stats are geared towards causing maximum damage, etc.) or characters who are equally capable of doing anything so long as they have the right equipment, with the former option thus far garnering 46.98 percent of the vote and the latter 53.01 percent of it.

Upgradeable guns vs. standard weapons: Having ‘standard’ guns that can’t be upgraded ensures fairness and emphasizes the differences between each weapon, but so far gamers still prefer weapons that can be modded and upgraded, with 83.73 percent of respondents voting for that option.

As you can see, some of these options certainly indicate that not much work has yet been done on the game beyond the apparent creation of a new game engine (for example, the fact that Netease is asking if gamers prefer a story mode or an arcade mode for single player would seem to indicate developers haven’t really started work on the single player sections of the game yet).

We’re not completely certain that Netease is totally committed to abiding by these votes, and we’re hoping to hear back from the company soon with more details about how the game will be designed. If major design decisions like this really are being crowd-sourced, that would seem to be an industry first, but I wonder whether it will make for a good game. There is always the risk that when you try to please everyone you end up pleasing no one, and the crowd-sourced approach to design could certainly lead to a Frankenstein-style final product with lots of interesting bits but no cohesive whole. Either way, it’s a fascinating idea and we’re going to pry as much detail as we can out of Netease about it, so stay tuned!

We are reviewing our business to optimize our global game development operations through a process of selection and concentration, and this has led us to the difficult decision to close our China office and studio. GREE Beijing has developed several excellent games and the talented people who made up its staff have made a valuable contribution to GREE. We regret that we have had to make this closure and wish all the best to everyone affected.

Japan’s GREE has been a dominant force in mobile games on its home turf, and over the past few years has overseen an aggressive expansion overseas. But late last year the company was forced to lay off employees at its North American office, and now it has apparently shuttered its China branch completely.

We have contacted GREE for comment on this story and will update it if we hear back.

According to an internal announcement at GREE China yesterday (as reported by Sina Tech), the branch will totally cease operations on June 28th, and all of its employees will be laid off. The company has not yet announced a compensation plan for employees, but it should have plenty of time to roll something out over the next month and a half before the shutdown actually takes place.

The reason for GREE China’s demise — and the company’s declining fortunes in general — is generally believed to be its failure to recognize and commit to the global movement towards smartphones quickly enough. 60 percent of GREE’s revenue is still coming from feature phone users, but feature phone users are getting scarcer and the company has not carved out a dominant position as a smartphone gaming platform on either Android or iOS.

Of course, this is not to say the company is about to collapse. GREE is still projecting a net profit of around $300 million this quarter, but then again, if the company’s projections are correct it will be the first time since 2008 that GREE has seen its profits drop. It seems likely that given this shift, the company has decided to concentrate on its strengths on its home turf of Japan and reduce the degree to which it’s extended overseas. That’s probably a smart business move, but it’s a bummer for everyone working in the GREE China office.

Related: GREE’s founding story

(via Sina Tech)

Today payment service MOL announced its partnership with Indonesian mini-mart retailer Alfamart, Alfamidi, and Lawson. Starting today, gamers can purchase MOLPoints’ game vouchers at those markets, which in total have over one thousand branches spread all over Indonesia.

In Indonesia, MOLPoints is considered a payment gateway for purchasing Facebook game credits. In fact, the payment service company claims that it sells the cheapest Facebook credits compared to the other Facebook credit sellers in the country. It is still cheaper to purchase the credits directly with credit card, but if you don’t have one in Indonesia, then MOL should be at the top of your mind.

MOL has also partnered with several entities in selling its game vouchers including online payment store partners like i-Pay and Gudang Voucher, as well as telcos Indosat and Telkom Indonesia.

Talking about MOL’s Southeast Asian market

As MOL CEO Ganesh told us that Indonesia is the company’s top priority this year, I dug deeper into the reason by speaking with MOL representatives Rivai Adidharma and Jaka Kristandi. They confirmed that Indonesia will be the most important market for the company, alongside Brazil. Both countries have a huge population as well as a lot of gamers. Rivai explained that India, though it has larger population, doesn’t have many gamers.

In terms of revenue in Southeast Asia, MOL’s biggest revenues come from Thailand, Vietnam, and Malaysia. Particularly for Malaysia, the ones generating the highest ARPU there are the Chinese gamers playing Chinese language games. While Indonesia hasn’t generated that much ARPU, its number of users is quite impressive. Though it was not revealed how many of MOL’s users are Indonesian, Rivai and Jaka said that out of its 700,000 global Facebook fans, around 400,000 of them are Indonesians. The Indonesian fan page is also picking up growth with 79,000 likes.

Interestingly, MOL consistently earns its biggest revenue in Indonesia from Facebook credit sales. But there are times when voucher sales from just one game can beat even the rest of the other MOL games. That game is Crystal Legacy. One other game which sells a lot alongside Crystal Legacy is Voomga’s Mythic Saga. MOL’s highest ARPU in Indonesia is derived from the MMORPG users.

Rivai also revealed that MOL has around 2.7 million users in all of its 12 country markets. And out of all of them, a staggering 2.1 million people are active monthly users of MOL. The payment service company has been very aggressive in building its regional presence recently. Last month, MOL acquired 50 percent stake at Vietnamese online payment gateway NganLuong, and acquired another payment service company in Indonesia called AyoPay the previous month. Its movement has been felt in countries such as Turkey, Australia, and New Zealand too. This is all geared toward bringing the company closer to a better IPO next year.

1. League of Legends
2. Sudden Attack
3. FIFA Online 3
4. Aion Online
5. Blade & Soul
6. Starcraft
7. Lineage
8. Warcraft 3
9. Cyphers (Apologies, this one doesn’t have a Wikipedia entry in English)
10. Diablo 3

More interesting than the list itself are the statistics Gametrics tracked on what percent of the internet cafe gaming market these games hold, which show that League of Legends is utterly dominating everything else with a whopping 39.99 percent of the market. By contrast, second-place Sudden Attack has less than 10 percent, and third-place FIFA Online 3 barely has 5 percent.

It’s also worth noting that when comparing this to a similar recent list for China, League of Legends is the only point of overlap. The lesson there: Asian gamers love League of Legends (not that that’s a surprise). It’s also worth pointing out that some pretty old games feature on both China’s and South Korea’s top games lists; clearly Asian gamers are less picky about having the latest graphics and physics than their pixel-peeping counterparts in the West.

(Gametrics via 17173)

I’ll say it again: if there is one mobile game out there right now that people in Japan will remember in 10 years, it’s Puzzle and Dragons.

The game, which boasts 13 million registered users in this country (10 percent of the population), has generated US$113 million in sales in April.

Since late last year, maker GungHo’s market cap at the Osaka Stock Exchange kept rising and rising – to about $10 billion – to the point that the company is worth more than Mobage operator DeNA, GREE, and Zynga combined.

The Korean version of GungHo’s money-raking game.

And today, GungHo (3765.OS) shares jumped limit-up by 300,000 yen to 1,342,000 yen (up 28.8 percent) in just a few minutes of trading, until the stock was bid-only.

As a consequence, the company’s market cap now reached 1.54 trillion yen, which translates to $15.1 billion. With this number, GungHo topped Nintendo’s market cap of US$1.53 trillion yen (or US$15.0 billion).

The US$15.1 billion market cap is also higher than that of Nikon, Fujitsu, Isuzu, Sanyo, All Nippon Airways, Sharp, or Mitsubishi Motors.

It’s a new world we live in.

Other market caps (Monday, May 13 at 11:30am JST):

• GREE: $2.8 billion
• DeNA: $3.6 billion
• Zynga at $2.6 billion
• Electronic Arts: $6.7 billion
• Activision Blizzard: $16.7 billion

GungHo’s new owner SoftBank can be very happy.

Everybody loves a good mystery. And it seems the folks at Netease have gotten people talking about one with this teaser page for a new first-person shooter. More about the game will be revealed next Tuesday, but there are some very interesting clues on the teaser page (pictured above).

First is the series of “passwords” used to “hack” into the computer. The three passwords that fail initially are CryEngine, Unreal, and Frostbite. As hardcore gamers know, these are the names of three of the biggest and most modern FPS game engines in the world, and have been used for many of recent globally high-profile FPS titles. But the computer on the teaser site rejects those “passwords” and instead chooses Dynamite. Since that’s not the name of an existing game engine, we can only assume that Netease has developed its own engine for use with this upcoming game.

While it could just be marketing hype, it was definitely bold for Netease to put this apparently engine in the same league as CryEngine, Unreal, and Frostbite. If it really is on that level — and that’s a big if — it could signify an attempt by Netease to move beyond China, or at least to license its new engine to the global game developers who are now using CryEngine or the Unreal engine for their games.

We can also make a few guesses about the game itself from the teaser page. Given that the gun and helicopter on the desk appear to be pretty modern, we can assume the game takes place in or around the present day, and that it probably also involves some vehicle combat. The bloody biohazard symbol is interesting, too — could the game’s plot concern chemical warfare of some kind?

There are also a few guesses we can make about the game based on Netease’s past record of game development. While it seems clear this game is a first-person shooter, Netease’s most successful games have been MMORPGs, and it seems likely that this game may include some MMORPG elements, although it’s hard to say exactly what. More interestingly, though, many of Netease’s biggest games include elements of Chinese history and mythology. Will this shooter also include some China-specific elements to make it more appealing to the hometown crowd?

Whatever it turns out to be, the game is facing what is likely to be stiff competition from the impending release of Call of Duty Online, Activision and Tencent’s interpretation of the global smash-hit shooter franchise as a freemium PC game for the Chinese market. The game is coming out soon, and while I’ve argued that hardcore Chinese gamers may be put off by it, it’s still likely to be very popular, and Netease’s game will need to be pretty impressive to turn heads away from the CoD spectacle.

Japan-based social gaming platform DeNA (TYO:2432) has just rolled out its Q4 and full-year 2012 financials. After an expensive previous quarter in which profits dipped, the same thing happened again for DeNA in Q4 (up to March 31st 2013) with an operating profit of $184 million, which is down from $216 million in Q3, but up three percent on the previous year.

Quarterly revenue was $528 million (up 22 percent from same time last year), but below Q3’s record-breaking figure.

Things are rosier for the whole of the 2102 fiscal year, in which DeNA brought in a record $2.04 billion in revenues and $775 million in profit. Here’s the key table:

DeNA chose its quarterly highlights as:

• MobaCoin consumption in Japan was 58.3 billion yen ($588 million), 2.5 percent lower than the previous quarter.
• Overseas MobaCoin consumption showed strong and steady quarter-to-quarter increase, approaching $70 million.
• Increased user engagement drove monetization growth. As a result, Mobage titles occupied top ranks in US Google Play’s top-grossing chart.
• DeNA and Nexon formed a global business alliance to bring new Nexon-developed games to Mobage networks.
• Groovy, DeNA’s new music player app was launched in Japan.

For the current Q1 2013, DeNA expects to make $175 million in operating profit (UPDATE: Corrected that figure. It’s for Q1 only, not FY13).

See the full stats on DeNA’s IR homepage.

Brisbane-headquartered game studio Halfbrick is nailing it in China with its Fruit Ninja game. If you think people are sick of slicing all kinds of fruit on their mobile screens, then you’re so wrong.

Speaking with Phil Larsen, chief marketing officer at Halfbrick on the sidelines of the Global Mobile Internet Conference (GMIC) in Beijing today, he told me that Fruit Ninja has been downloaded 500 million times across the world. Out of which, China accounted for 200 million of these downloads with 50 million monthly active users coming from China. Phil told me:

Fruit Ninja is a very simple casual game that has a universal theme. It’s not about shooting, action, or any particular game play. It’s based on fruits and it’s all around the world… So it crosses the language barrier [since] it doesn’t need any text to play. You can understand just from the visuals alone. And that kind of simple arcade gameplay really works well in China.

The Fruit Ninja craze in China is done without having an office in China. Phil says that Halfbrick wanted to keep the company small and lean. Instead of opening an office in China, the Australian company works with iDreamSky who helps Halfbrick distribute their games in China, mainly working with telcos and local Android app marketplaces.

Despite having huge download numbers, the revenue figures from China aren’t proportionally large. In China, the Fruit Ninja Android app generates revenue through in-app purchases and ads. Phil explains that Chinese gamers in general are okay as long as they are able to enjoy 90 percent of the game without spending. If needed, Chinese gamers are willing to farm (without paying) for higher level items. So in the future, Fruit Ninja is looking to draw in paying Chinese users to try the 100 percent full gaming experience for a limited time and hope that they will buy to keep up with that level.

Besides Fruit Ninja, Halfbrick also has other games including Jetpack Joyride, Zombie Dash, and its latest title, Fish Out Of Water.

This is part of our coverage of GMIC 2013 in Beijing, running yesterday and today (May 7 and 8). For other stories from this event, click here.

Translated chart via youxistory.com

The rankings are apparently calculated based on the scores of individual students, and I suspect it’s not an extremely precise system, but even so, it’s interesting that some of China’s most elite academic schools are also the best schools at DOTA. I guess when you work hard, you play hard too! It’s also worth noting that Wuhan has two schools in the top six (though having once visited Wuhan, I can’t say I’m surprised students there prefer to stay indoors playing computer games).

(QQ Games via Youxi Story)

Tencent’s Pony Ma (sat on right) takes questions from the host and a panel of industry experts.

This afternoon at the Global Mobile Internet Conference (GMIC) event in Beijing, Tencent’s ‘Pony’ Ma Huateng was on stage speaking about his company’s strategy and future. The first question was about the struggle Tencent’s WeChat has with China’s mobile telcos, which is one of the hottest tech topics in China right now. But Ma seems confident that WeChat isn’t going to charge users.

Ma was questioned how WeChat will be monetized by Tencent (HKG:0700). There are quite a few methods – stickers and games – as the onstage panelists suggest. (Line and KakaoTalk have been doing all these so successfully). Ma agrees that these are indeed the ways to make money for WeChat. Another way to make money, he explains, is via offline to online services and also digital products, such as an artist who could share their art on mobile platforms like WeChat. That sounds a lot like digital publishing which Line and KakaoTalk recently started doing.

The next question asked was if QQ, Tencent’s traditional IM service, will cannibalize WeChat. Pony explained that their functions are different, for example push-to-talk and voice messaging never existed on QQ. QQ’s active users are double that of Wechat. Ma says that companies can’t just have a department that helps desktop products turn into mobile products. Rather, there must be a department that needs to focus entirely on building for mobile from scratch.

Ma says that mobile is a very tricky industry; despite the existence of a lot of giant web companies, many of them may not be winners in the end. Tencent is always not at the start of the wave nor at the end. It always comes in at the right time, the host states.

The onstage host commented that Tencent is winning on every front on the Chinese web, especially mobile. But Ma humbly said that search and e-commerce aren’t successful points for Tencent. Indeed, it’s Soso search engine, and its various e-stores, like Paipai and QQ Buy, have always struggled.

Learning from Facebook

Ma says that overs the years, Tencent learned that it couldn’t do everything and will be working with third-party companies closely in the future. He also confirms that WeChat will have social games and assures game developers that Tencent will not be providing their own games. Ma now sees Tencent as a platform company rather than a content company.

The founder and CEO adds that Facebook is the first successful open platform on the web, and that emerged back in 2007. Tencent only got into this kind of space in 2009. Ma says that doing an open platform is technically challenging and must be done with care. So it took Tencent two years, starting in 2011, before Tencent really pushed itself as an open platform company. If I’m not interpreting this wrongly, Tencent seems to be prepping hard for its mobile gaming platform despite seeing KakaoTalk and Line out in the market already.

Will Tencent go into hardware? Ma says he is interested but doesn’t have a clear plan on hardware. One thing’s for sure, Tencent isn’t going to work on a phone. There’s no clue about Tencent doing a Google Glass-like device either.

Pony Ma is also famous for testing the user experience of his own products. Ma explains that he will try to imagine himself as an average user or a not so savvy user to test applications. He says that besides providing a great user experience in its applications, Tencent’s success factor is to keep innovating.

Competition, innovation

WeChat went global in 2012. It now has nearly 400 million users – but most are in China.

Commenting on Alibaba’s investment in Sina Weibo last week, the Tencent CEO says he doesn’t feel threatened; rather, he feels that it is only natural. Instead of clashing, Ma suggests that the real challenge is to keep innovating and create new technologies to serve people better.

When the host asked the panelists if WeChat can help Tencent get on the global stage, all but one person raised their hands. Ma himself feels 50/50 about this opportunity, noting that there are strong competitors overseas – a reference, I believe, to Whatsapp and Line. But as Ma has always said, mobile has given Chinese companies a good chance to innovate and succeed globally.

Ma actually met the NHN Line CEO this afternoon and revealed that there might be a way to collaborate. Both of them agree that once a chat app is popular in the country, it tends to stick on unless something major crops up. Ma explains that in the future, there could be more collaboration. But for now, Line and WeChat are competitors both in China and in the international markets (also note that Tencent has invested in rival Korean-made app KakaoTalk). And Ma believes that to do well globally, localization is important. For example, some aspects of WeChat in China (where the app is called Weixin), such as the ‘drifting bottle’ with secret messages that go out to random people, have been removed from international versions of the WeChat app.

Ma concludes by saying that he is enjoying the journey now as Tencent’s WeChat expands globally. And, regardless of the result, win or lose, he will be giving his best shot to put Tencent and Chinese tech companies on the global map.

This is part of our coverage of GMIC 2013 in Beijing, running today and tomorrow (May 7 and 8). For other stories from this event, click here.

China’s UCWeb and its UC Browser app for mobiles have more than 400 million users worldwide with 100 million outside of China. Today at the Global Mobile Internet Conference (GMIC) in Beijing, UCWeb announced that it will invest RMB 3 billion (more than $480 million) over the next three years. The project is codenamed/abbreviated ‘GEEK’ and will focus on four things:

• Global expansion: Focusing on Brazil, Vietnam, Russia, and Indonesia. CEO and founder, Yu Yongfu also said that UCWeb will be opening up offices in these four countries very soon.
• Open Ecosystem: UCWeb will continue to strengthen its platform and replicate local success overseas. UCWeb says that its gaming platform has more than 20 games which are generating more than $150,000 each month right now. 200 million clicks are registered every day across all versions of UC Browser.
• Evolved monetization: Searching for new revenue streams while sustaining the growth for gaming content. In 2012, more than $15 million was generated from the games platform.
• Technology Know-how: Integrate with the cloud and scale to support new extensions and services in the future through technology advancement.

UCWeb CEO Yu Yongfu talking at GMIC2013 this afternoon.

To fuel UCWeb’s GEEK plan, CEO Yu said that the company has more than RMB 1 billion ($161 million) in cash and is already profitable. UCWeb’s revenue has doubled in the last three years and is generating revenue from ads (50 percent) and games (50 percent). The profit margin for ads could be as high as 85 percent, he added. If needed, CEO Yu claims that there are a lot of investors who are hungry to invest in UCWeb.

UCWeb, as we have written before, is poised for IPO in 2013. But in the interview with CEO Yu today, he said that he would rather delay going public to avoid unnecessary pressure from investors. Yu also said that UCWeb isn’t interested to get acquired and be part of a larger company. So while Baidu may be actually interested in UCWeb, it seems like Yu isn’t willing to let go.

UCWeb currently has more than 1,500 staff across the world and is looking to add another 1,000 more people in the coming three years.

(Photo of Yu from QQ Tech)

This is part of our coverage of GMIC 2013 in Beijing, running today and tomorrow (May 7 and 8). For other stories from this event, click here.

Indonesia has had its moments when it comes to making scary movies, but those days are long gone thanks to the crappy sexualized horror movies popping up every month or so. On the bright side, we might see the gross-out glory days back, but this time in the form of a PC game. Arguably the hottest horror game in Indonesia, DreadOut has received a lot of publicity both nationally and internationally. Now the game studio is asking your help to make the project come true through crowdsourcing site Indiegogo – and by voting for it to get onto Steam.

Developed by Digital Happiness, DreadOut tells the story of an Indonesian high school girl venturing through creepy landscapes equipped with only a smartphone camera as weapon. Yes, that doesn’t tell a lot about the storyline, but the mystery is part of the chilling thrill. Inside the game you will find numerous Indonesian spectral characters like tuyul and pocong as ghosts.

Game producer Rachmad Imron told us that the reason they’re building this game is because they like horror-themed entertainment very much, and that a lot of people share their enthusiasms about it. The team is betting that high quality games are slowly moving in a new direction by moving to platforms such as Steam Box and Ouya. Besides that, 3D PC games represent a less saturated market than the usual 2D mobile games.

Rachmad explained that most of the team members are 3D artists, and that they’ve been working on animation for years prior to DreadOut. So far, the game looks really scary. It is touted to be one of the six upcoming games that look terrifying by the Bloody Disgusting blog, alongside other famous titles like Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs. The DreadOut demo game has been played by numerous online game testers like PewDiePie as well.

Lending a hand

There are a few ways that you can help the DreadOut project. First, you can help spread the word about the game to your friends. Second, the team is seeking funding for DreadOut on Indiegogo. Digital Happiness promises a few rewards like becoming one of the games’ ghosts for a certain level of funding. Third, you can also vote the game on Steam. Or fourth, if you have a nice office in the area, the team consisting of 17 people from Bandung is looking for a new place to work.

The game has been in development for two years, and it will be released late this year. The game demo is out, and you can play it on Mac and PC.

We know that Tencent is developing a social gaming platform for WeChat, its popular messaging app, but so far we’ve not heard about its mobile gaming ambitions. Now, vice-president of Tencent’s Game Division Ma Xiaoyi has explained how WeChat’s gaming features will be influenced by more than a decade of Tencent’s experience in both casual and hardcore gaming, and suggests that the platform will be integrated with QQ, the company’s ubiquitous instant messenger service that already has game and virtual currency elements and also other core mobile products including its Android store, MyApp.

Talking today at the Global Mobile Game Confederation (GMGC) event in Beijing, Ma added that WeChat will be aiming its gaming platform initially at Chinese mobile gamers who he predicted to be at 300 million by the end of this year. Basically, that’s everyone with a half-way decent smartphone. That makes the Chinese mobile gaming market, Ma reckons, worth around RMB 60 billion (about US$9.68 billion) in a year.

Ma shared more about Tencent’s unified platform (translation ours):

In the future, Tencent will release a unified mobile gaming platform. This platform will comprise of Tencent’s main mobile applications. Through this unified platform, we can create an excellent platform for our developers to bring the best games to our users.

Echoing CEO and founder Pony Ma’s view, Ma believes that mobile has provided a great platform for Chinese companies to rise. He says in his speech today that China was 30 years late on video gaming compared to Japan and US, 15 years late on PC gaming compared to US and Europe, and five years late on web gaming compared to Korea. But for mobile gaming he believes that China is finally on the same starting line as other nations. With Tencent’s loyal gamers, reach, proven business model, and resources, Ma is hopeful to work with China’s most talented mobile game developers to bring the best games to users on both WeChat and mobile QQ.

WeChat’s social gaming elements will rival similar platforms from Line, KakaoTalk, Apple, GREE, and DeNA. Tencent is already China’s top gaming and internet company, posting company-wide revenues of $7 billion for full-year 2012.

(Source: Techweb – article in Chinese)

After months of testing it out in South Korea and Japan, the messaging app KakaoTalk is today launching its social gaming platform for users in Indonesia and Vietnam. Along with this, a number of third-party game developers have created Indonesian and Vietnamese language versions of their social gaming titles that integrate with KakaoTalk.

Five games are ready today for the messaging app’s users in Indonesia and Vietnam: HotDogStudio’s Everyone’s Game for Kakao, Com2uS’s Tiny Pang for Kakao, LIVEZEN’s Astrowings for Kakao, GameZen’s BirdPang for Kakao, and CraveMob’s Hunter Cat for Kakao (pictured).

KakaoTalk has been pushing hard into both those Southeast Asian markets in the past few months, even spending on a big budget TV ad campaign for Indonesians that fused K-pop with one Indo pop star.

Korea-based KakaoTalk has just over 80 million users, and the startup made $7 million in profit last year, despite being up against web giant rivals like NHN (makers of Line), Tencent (WeChat), and Facebook Messenger.

The KakaoTalk Game Platform launched in its home market last August and soon showed its worth by propelling a number of its supported games to the top of Korea’s gaming charts. It then rolled out in February in Japan (Update: Also in the US since last November).

We know that Mumbai-based game studio Reliance Entertainment Digital makes a lot of titles, but it usually focuses on mobile. That’s why it has only just made its debut on Mac OS X. The game in question is Real Steel HD, based on the robot fighter movie Real Steel that starred Hugh Jackman.

While Jackman is nowhere to be seen in Real Steel HD, the game gives you plenty of choices for a monstrous metallic melée with the option of a tournament or survival mode.

Reliance Games first released Real Steel back in 2011 and has seen millions of downloads across versions for Android and iOS.

As for the studio itself, Reliance Games expanded its operations in Japan and South Korea last month by acquiring Funnel Japan and taking a 51 percent stake in Seoul’s Bluesom. With those scoops, the Indian studio seems set to launch a turn-based card battle game in those East Asian markets to challenge the phenomenally successful Puzzle and Dragons.

Reliance Entertainment Digital subsidiary Zapak Mobile Games recently recorded a whopping 100 million downloads from the Nokia Ovi Store for its very many feature phone titles.

Real Steel HD is priced at US$6.99 in the Mac App Store.

Tuesday marked the beginning of the blockbuster Call of Duty franchise’s first real entry into China: Call of Duty Online. Western publisher Activision has paired with China’s Tencent to launch the game in China, and while not everything is online yet — microtransactions aren’t yet available and it’s called “closed beta” for a reason — we should soon begin to see how China’s gaming marketplace will react to the game.

On the one hand, there’s every reason to expect success. Call of Duty is a popular franchise everywhere — China is not an exception — and having an official version and official (hopefully lag-free) servers on the mainland should help to increase the franchise’s popularity.

Even so, though, I have to wonder if the game is offering enough. While it’s being billed as “a totally new game” on the official site, there isn’t much to it that’s new at all. For example, the “new maps” in the latest alpha build of the game are almost all from previously-released Call of Duty games, including a couple from the original Modern Warfare game that is now more than half a decade old.

And while previous Call of Duty games were never marketed to Chinese players, many Chinese gamers have played them. Indeed, Call of Duty titles are among the most widely pirated in China (if street-side pirated game salesmen are any indication). For many Chinese gamers, these “new maps” are six years old because they played the original Modern Warfare at the same time everyone else did. So what’s new and exciting about Call of Duty Online for them? As far as I can tell: nothing, except for the fact that they now have the opportunity to pay for things in the game. Oh joy.

To be clear, I still expect Call of Duty Online to do well, if for no other reason than that the promise of being able to play lag-free games on Tencent’s servers is going to entice a lot of FPS gamers into trying the game out (again). But I suspect a subset of Chinese gamers will still be a bit miffed about having what is very clearly old content repackaged and shoved in their faces while Activision and Tencent shout about how it’s “all new.” Chinese FPS fans have played Call of Duty games and they are not idiots; the game may be fun but there isn’t much about it that’s actually new.

With that said, we’re still planning to take the new game for a spin and kick the tires a bit once it comes out of closed beta. It will be interesting to see just how deeply Tencent and Activision have embedded microtransactions into this game, and whether they ultimately enhance it or cripple it. My hopes are for the former, but neither Activision nor Tencent have a great record when it comes that sort of thing, so we’ll have to wait and see. In the meantime, though, don’t believe the hype about Call of Duty Online being “all new.” It’s not.

There is no end to the Puzzle and Dragons hype in Japan, it seems.

The country’s top smartphone game now has over 12 million users, is generating a staggering US$62 million to $86 million per month, and has been advertised with a new campaign on national TV since the end of March.

Maker GungHo (3765.OS) has just announced a Nintendo DS version of the RPG/puzzle hybrid game for later this year, in addition to the release of a spin-off dubbed Puzzle and Dragons Challenge for iOS and Android a few days ago. both titles are for Japan only at this point.

And recently, the company rolled out a Puzzle and Dragons English version on Android (here is the iOS version that came out late last year).

GungHo is listed on the Osaka Stock Exchange, and I have pointed out how their market cap has risen over the last few months (driven almost exclusively by Puzzle and Dragons’ growth) quite a few times in the past.

As a reaction to the two Puzzle and Dragons spin-offs and the new English-language Android version of the game, GungHo’s stock price went through the roof.

After adding close to 15 percent in a single day, GungHo’s market cap now stands at a mind-blowing US$9 billion (Editor’s note: It’s $10 billion as of now). In that area, GungHo destroys every mobile game company out there, including:

• DeNA ($4 billion)

• GREE ($2.8 billion)

• Zynga ($2.4 billion)

With over $10 billion, GungHo’s market cap exceeds that of national airline ANA, Daihatsu, Mitsubishi Motors, Sanyo Electric, NEC, or Sharp: that’s what one successful smartphone game – a potential new billion dollar franchise – can trigger on the Japanese market.

India-based mobile gaming developer and publisher Zapak Mobile Games made an announcement a couple of days ago that it has now passed the 100 million user download mark from all of its game titles on the Nokia Store. How many of Zapak’s game titles so far on Nokia? Over 350. The company notes its huge increase from 50,000 download mark passed just 14 months ago.

Currently ranked first on India’s Nokia Store, Zapak discloses that its most popular game is T20 Cricket 2012 with 7.76 million downloads, with Border War Face Off at second place with 5.83 million downloads. Nokia India representative Gerard Wego believes that Indians love games. With over 80 million downloads occurring on the Nokia India Store every month, one of its most popular categories is gaming.

Besides having its games on the Nokia Store, Zapak also showcases its games on its mobile site. A Reliance Entertainment Digital (the parent company of Zapak) representative told us that the mobile site has roughly three million unique visitors every month. The team will focus on creating local content that can be connected with its Indian audiences.

When it comes to mobile games, Reliance Entertainment Digital is eyeing a bigger market than just India. The company has made its presence felt in Canada, the US, as well as Korea and Japan. Its international gaming division Reliance Games – which primarily builds smartphone games – has announced its full acquisition of the mobile gaming division of Funnel Japan and the majority acquisition of Korean gaming studio Bluesom a month ago.

The big picture, the representative said, is to cater to the first generation of mobile device users in India while strengthening the company’s footprints in the international market.

According to Tencent Games, Korean Game publisher Liveplex has inked a deal with Thailand’s SBT to bring its risque MMORPG Queen’s Blade Online to the country for the first time. Queen’s Blade Online, also sometimes called Scarlet Blade, has previously expanded into Japan, Taiwan, and China.

Like most MMORPGs, Queen’s Blade Online is apparently mostly a monster-killing grind, but unlike most MMORPGs its characters are mostly women (and disturbingly, one young girl) wearing some of the skimpiest outfits imaginable (yes, I know a lot of games have women in absurd outfits, but Queen’s Blade takes it to another level). I haven’t actually played it, but based on the videos I have seen, the dev team seems to have spent a lot of time on its, ahem, bouncing physics.

Whether you find this kind of game titillating or creepy, it’s hard to deny that it sells, and very soon, it will likely be selling in Thailand. But I challenge even the most dedicated giant-digital-boobs enthusiast to watch the last minute of this video (NSFW, obviously), which features some of the game’s leading ladies dancing spastically to club music, and not cringe.

(via QQ Games)

Ostensibly, the billboard is an ad for a new Giant Interactive fantasy game called Xianxia World that went into its first limited beta last Friday. But to understand why it says “dick strings” in huge characters — and why Giant would advertise a Chinese game in New York city at all — we have to go back a lot further.

“Dick strings” — diaosi in Chinese — is a term that originated several years ago on Baidu’s Tieba forums. As you might expect given its literal meaning, diaosi was not a term of endearment, it referred to people who were: “poor, short, ugly, fat, stupid, excessively-masturbating failures.” ChinaSmack suggests “loser” and “douchebag” as more succinct translations of the term’s official meaning, and both of those seem apt enough.

Over time, though, the usage of the word has changed dramatically. Although it still means “loser”, it has been co-opted by a particular subset of the online community and used as a sort of self-definition. Perhaps similar to the term “geek” in the US or otaku in Japan, diaosi began as an insult but has become something that many Chinese gamers and internet users self-identify as. These days, the term has real appeal to many who see themselves as perhaps not blessed with wealth or beauty, but still passionate about gaming and the internet. It’s a rallying cry and a way of relating to one another that’s self-deprecating but (some would say) also empowering.

Needless to say, this strikes plenty of people as ridiculous. Back in February, Chinese film director Feng Xiaogang kicked off a debate on Weibo about the term when he posted his thoughts on it and “grassroots,” another popular slang term that means poor or “common”:

Calling yourself grassroots is laughing at yourself, calling yourself diaosi is debasing yourself. They are two separate classifications; the former refers to the socially disadvantaged community, the latter refers to the idiot community.

But not everyone agreed with Feng. In fact, Giant Interactive CEO Shi Yuzhu rushed to the defense of the self-defined diaosi, writing “I am a real diaosi,” and then, tellingly, “I have already applied for a trademark for diaosi to use for an internet game.”

“Diaosi goddess” reads this image from the Giant game’s home page.

In a lengthy analytical piece, Sina Tech argues that the term doesn’t really mean “dick strings,” and points out that other Chinese terms like niubi (“badass”) have rather disgusting literal meanings but have become fairly normalized and acceptable in everyday speech nevertheless. It even (without irony as far as I can tell) points to the controversy surrounding George Bernard Shaw’s use of the term “bloody” in the play Pygmalion as a similar example of a controversy over “vulgar” language that ultimately became rather non-controversial as time passed and people got used to it. And while Shi Yuzhu is no George Bernard Shaw and Chinese internet forums are not Pygmalion, the point is that given time, diaosi won’t be considered too vulgar a term for use in advertising.

Actually, though, it is exactly because the term is vulgar that Shi chose to use it on the Times Square billboard. He and Giant never had any intention of advertising the game to Americans (there isn’t even an English version of Xianxia World); they simply needed a place that would allow the ad to run for a few days because they didn’t understand what it said. Most high-profile advertisers in China would certainly have turned the ad down for being vulgar, but in the US, apparently someone was gullible enough to take the ad without having it translated, and that’s how “dick strings” ended up in huge characters on a high-profile billboard in Times Square.

The point of the stunt was to drum up controversy and attention in China — in such a high profile spot, the billboard was certain to be noticed by Chinese visitors and reporters in the US — and boy did it work. Stories about the ad appeared all over the Chinese press, and then again last week when the ad was conveniently de-listed the day before Xianxia World‘s first beta launched. Even official state media like the People’s Daily and Xinhua covered the news, and of course it also sparked a lot of discussion and long analytical pieces of the sort you’re reading right now or that Chinese gamers have been reading on sites like Sina Tech.

As to whether Giant Interactive really buys into the diaosi mentality or whether it’s all just a cynical marketing ploy is impossible to say, but either way things have certainly worked out well for the company. It got much more attention than the average beta launch for what looks to be just another in China’s vast array of fantasy online games, and self-described diaosi may be poor losers, but a lot of them spend the money that they do have on games. Whether the controversy Shi has drummed up will translate into sales remains to be seen, but he’s put a lot of eyes on his game’s launch, and that’s an important first step.

Indonesian comedy band Project Pop is quite famous in Indonesia. Since the group’s debut on TVs with its previously named group Project-P in the 1990’s, they have become quite a household name here. Yesterday, the band announced the launch of a game titled Power Pop which features members of the group as characters.

The game itself is built by local developer Own Games. This Power Pop game is built for Nokia Asha Full Touch phones and will cost you IDR 5,000 (US$0.50) for the full version. Power Pop is a 2D side scrolling action game where you are the main character and must fend off invading pirates which are looking to steal the island. Yes, it’s not a typo, the pirates are indeed trying to steal the island. not invade. That’s the kind of wacky premise that suits Project Pop just fine.

Each game character comes with its own special attributes, like Tika Panggabean’s dogs and Yosi’s basketball. One of the trademarks of Own Games’ titles is its mascot, Tako, which shows up in each of its games. This time Tako is a secret playable character after you complete the game. The team insists that for each and every project, Tako must be involved as this is Own Games’ personal touch. This kind of idealism has led to the studio rejecting a few offers to build games for other parties.

Pitching with a tweet

Own Games founder Eldwin Viriya told me that the game was released two weeks ago, and in that short time it has been downloaded over 18,000 times on the Nokia store. He also talked about the story of how his team got this project in the first place: by pitching with a cold tweet.

Eldwin sent a tweet to one of Project Pop’s members, Tika, to ask if she’s interested to build a game together. The following day, the group was meeting Project Pop’s manager. But it took quite some time and persuasion to get Project Pop onboard with the game idea.

Own Games has so far built eight titles, all aimed mostly at Nokia users and/or Nokia’s Symbian OS. The developer won the recent Lumia Apps Olympiad in Indonesia with its Windows Phone game called DragManArds. The startup was also one of the winners at Ancol’s Coding on the Beach competition.

You can give the game a try here. The band also sells some Power Pop merchandise which can be shipped worldwide from here.

Mr. Tanaka, founder of GREE at work.

Japanese gaming company GREE (TYO:3632) is one of the most admired companies from Asia. But few companies can defy the gravity of economics. What goes up must come down and that unfortunately is happening to GREE. (UPDATED: Corrected headline, which mistakenly gave impression we were talking about GREE’s total market cap).

Bloomberg writes:

In five years, Yoshikazu Tanaka became Japan’s youngest billionaire as investors piled into GREE, valuing his controlling stake in the early maker of phone-based games at $4 billion. Just 18 months later, that has shriveled to about $1.4 billion.

The report also says that GREE is facing increasing pressure from Apple’s App Store and also Google Play where new-age smartphone users are downloading their games. It says that “GREE relies on the generation of handsets that preceded smartphones for 60 percent of revenue.” So more Japanese switching over to smartphones further shrinks GREE’s paying user-base.

In all fairness, GREE’s games are available on iOS and Android platforms as well. But it has to give part of its revenue to Apple and Google, like any app developer or publisher in those stores. GREE was also perhaps slow to ride the smartphone gaming wave with an unsatisfactory rollout of its English gaming platform. To make up for its smartphone game shortcomings, GREE has acquired Funzio ($210 million), Pokelabo ($173 million), and App Ant in the past year. Still, its US expansion isn’t going as smoothly as planned and profit dipped in the last quarter.

New competitors like Line and KakaoTalk are making the competition even more intense as these mobile messaging apps are proving to be good social platforms to host mobile games. While games on mobile chat applications still run on iOS and Android (thus still needing to offer part of their revenue to Apple and Google), the profits still look healthy. GREE’s reaction to the mobile war is Tellit, built by GREE-invested eBuddy. It’s growing well but still falls way short of Line (120 million), WeChat (300 million), and KakaoTalk’s (80 million) immense user-bases.

With all the above said, I trust that GREE’s founder Tanaka has what it takes to overcome these challenges. GREE’s success didn’t just happen overnight. It overcame a lot of challenges to reach today’s height.

When it comes to soccer¹, there’s one brand global video gamers prefer: FIFA. Despite being the product of America’s two-time “Worst Company Ever” winner EA, FIFA is beloved by fans both because it’s fun to play and because it includes tons of licensed teams from all the most popular soccer leagues around the world.

But Konami’s second-place Pro Evolution Soccer (PES, also called Winning Eleven in Japan) may have finally found a gap it can use to challenge FIFA’s dominance, especially in Asia: the Asian leagues. Konami announced on Monday that it has finalized a deal with the Asian Champions’ League that will see Asia’s top club teams coming to the game for the first time ever in PES 2014. And while FIFA does have teams from Korea’s K-League and Australia’s A-League, it doesn’t have any club teams from other Asian countries, so Konami’s game will be the first to offer those teams to players.

Chinese soccer fans, for example, will be able to play as China’s top club teams Guangzhou Hengda, Jiangsu Shuntian, Guizhou Renhe, and Beijing Guoan for the first time ever in a major soccer game. And Konami is reportedly in negotiations to bring the entirety of China’s Super League, Japan’s J League, and Thailand’s Premier League into the game as well.

Although the biggest European clubs have huge followings in Asia, Konami’s inclusion of Asian fans’ hometown clubs could be a way of helping it scoop up some of FIFA’s market share across the region. No team licensing can make up for a bad game, of course, and it remains to be seen whether PES 2014 will be able to compete with FIFA 14 on that front. But if the games are comparable in other ways, the pull of being able to play as the hometown heroes may be enough to bring some Asian fans over to PES.

In China, it already appears some fans are excited about the prospect of playing as Chinese Super League teams. The comments section on this article about the new PES 2014 seems to have descended quickly into banter and cursing, with fans talking about things like whether games played in Beijing Guoan’s home at Worker’s Stadium will feature the sounds of Guoan fans’ legendary foul-mouthed chants. If Konami can capitalize on that interest, it may just have found a way to challenge the dominance of FIFA in the world’s most populous continent.

1. Yes, I called it soccer and not football, because that’s what the game was originally called. Watch this newsreel clip of Liverpool FC from 1935 if you don’t believe me. Football used to refer to any game played on foot, with the most popular games being Association Football (the sport we now know as soccer) and Rugby Football. The name “association football” was later shortened to assoccer and then just soccer in the colloquial language of the time in the UK.

One of Perang Mistis’ cards – Rangda

Today, Indonesian game developer Agate Studio launched its newest game made for feature phone users in Indonesia. Called Perang Mistis (meaning “mystical battle”), the game is released on Agate Studio’s new feature phone gaming platform called Gempon, which was soft launched last week.

As with other feature phone-based games, Perang Mistis offers a simple social gaming experience. In this one you will earn ghost cards and use them to fight the other ghosts in this mystical battle. Early on, you will first get to choose one of three Indonesian ghosts, like tuyul and jelangkung. You can combine your ghost cards and battle with the other online players too.

An Agate Studio representative told us that they created Indonesia’s newest feature phone gaming platform, Gempon, because they want to build a better gaming ecosystem in Indonesia. The platform first went live five months ago, but only last week was it launched to the public with its payment system supported by the country’s biggest telco, Telkomsel.

So far there are over 10,000 members on Gempon. Its monthly active user-base is also around the 10,000 mark, with about 1,000 daily active users. There are 10 games available to be played on Gempon. This includes Agate Studio’s flagship game Football Saga and Agate Jogja’s Mayapadha. Gempon is fully in the Indonesian language.

Foreign players

The Agate Studio representative remarked that there is something ironic about the Indonesian game market so far. Essentially, foreign players are making more money here while local developers are having problems doing so. He added that Gempon will focus on bringing more local developers onboard, as well as helping them monetize their games.

The foreign players the studio rep could be referring to include Singapore-based Kotagames which now has around six million users. Another Singaporean feature phone gaming player looking to make a mark here is FunSpot, which just tied a payment partnership with the same telco that supports all three feature phone players mentioned here – Telkomsel.

The feature phone market in Indonesia is still a big one with space for more to join in the gaming sector. According to Jakarta Founder Institute director Andy Zain, out of 280 million mobile phone connections in Indonesia, 115 million of them are online. But only a mere 30 million of them subscribe to 3G data packages. This means – according to my math – that feature phone gaming platforms like Gempon, Kotagames, and FunSpot have around 85 million 2G users to be shared.

Indonesian game developer Touchten announced today that the company has made a soft launch of its mobile game publishing platform. Its first publishing deal is with Indonesian game developer Tinker Games. The latter game developer is one to look out for in Indonesia, snatching one of the awards at the Indonesia Game Show 2012 and is part of Systec Group portfolio companies.

Touchten is publishing two games from Tinker Games, they are Paws! Cat Attack and Soccer Girl Adventure. Both are paid, casual games, and will be published under Anton’s account on iTunes. Tinker Games CEO Panji Prakoso explains this latest partnership with Touchten:

We know that Touchten already successfully launched a bunch of games for iOS, Android, and also the web. Touchten also created solid distribution channels for the mobile gaming industry, which will be a huge advantage for our games to be published by TouchTen.

For now, the two newly published games are not integrated with Touchten’s loyalty points feature powered by Gimmie World. But CEO Anton Soeharyo explained that they will treat all of their published games as if they’re Touchten’s own games. The Touchten team will offer its loyalty point feature, telco and e-money payment system, a promotional budget, and mentoring and consulting services to its platform partners.

Touchten has been one of the most successful Indonesian game developers, with its Train Legend title breaking into the top five overall free iOS app chart in the US market recently. The game company has around five million users for all its games with around 700,000 monthly active users. While there are arguably many other Indonesian developers who can build very nice games, they may still need help in terms of marketing those games in the West. A lot can definitely be learned from Touchten’s success.

The publishing platform will be fully launched, hopefully including all of the mentioned features, next month. Here are the videos of the two games that Touchten is now helping to publish:

Yodo1 is a game development studio in its own right, and it does a lot more than just peddle others’ games to Chinese smartphone owners. It actually co-produces the China-market versions of its clients games, getting access to the code so as to add graphics, music, and virtual items especially for local gamers.

In today’s announcement – via the team at TechCrunch – Yodo1 CEO Henry Fong says that it has 25 million active Chinese players of its clients’ titles, such as Defiant Development’s Ski Safari, and XMG’s Powder Monkeys. For fun, I made a collage of the Chinese and international versions of Powder Monkeys (pictured below) to compare and contrast the styles.

The funding will be used, Henry says, to “expand Yodo1′s production capacity […] and build the company’s platform and production team.” Referencing telco SingTel and possible future expansion, he added:

Emerging markets such as China and Southeast Asia represent the most exciting prospects for mobile games developers, with close to one billion mobile subscribers migrating from feature phones to smartphone handsets over the next two years. [For that reason,] the SingTel Group is a perfect partner for Yodo1, with over 450 million mobile subscribers across Southeast Asia and other high growth emerging markets, and growing.

China currently has about 160 million active Android users, and 85 million on iOS, representing a massive mobile gaming market that could easily grow to half a billion potential smartphone gamers by next year.

1. DNF (also called Dungeon & Fighter, Dungeon Fighter Online, etc.). A Korean-developed beat-’em-up game that’s pretty old (released back in 2005) but still very popular in China.
2. CrossFire*. China’s version of Counter-Strike (a tactical first-person shooter), another oldie-but-goodie that was actually developed by Korean devs SmileGate and released in 2007.
3. League of Legends. The DOTA-based competitive online game that has been immensely popular worldwide.
4. QQ Speed. A 2008 racer developed and released by — no big surprise here — Tencent Games.
5. QQ X5* (QQ炫舞). A casual dance game also first released by Tencent in 2008.
6. Dream of the Three Kingdoms (梦三国). A fantasy battle game developed by Hangzhou-based Electric Soul and released in 2009.
7. AgainstWar (逆战). A Tencent-developed online first-person shooter first released in 2011.
8. Fantasy Journey to the West. A fantasy RPG developed by Netease and first released all the way back in 2003.
9. Counter-Strike Online. The original tactical first-person shooter, popular around the world and still played in China too. Developed by Valve and Nexon, originally released in 2008.
10. NBA2KOL. As you can probably guess, this is an online basketball game developed by 2K Sports.

If you’re wondering why most of the games on this list seem really old, it’s because most of these games are frequently updated. Many of them now look totally different and have completely different content when compared to their original beta releases, so even if you’ve been playing the same title for years, the content stays fresh enough to keep gamers from getting bored.

(Info about the games comes from their Baidu Baike entries, image via this BusinessWeek article which incidentally happens to quote your humble correspondent.)

*Both of these games had alternate versions that also made the top ten list on QQ Games’s site, but since they’re just two different versions of the same game, I’ve left the alternate versions out of my own list.

That’s a big deal because it makes payment for users super easy, and when payment is easy, users pay more. Given that China Mobile has more than 700 million subscribers, this feature gives developers access to a massive marketplace with huge monetization potential. Moreover, the SDK allows developers to monetize in this way completely on their own, without joining any gaming social network.

The SDK also gives devs access to the AppFlood ad network, which allows devs to buy, sell, or trade ads with other apps, but the big selling point here is definitely the China Mobile billing integration, and for some developers, that’s definitely going to be a game-changer. PapayaMobile says that the new Android version of iBomber, the popular iOS game, will be the first game to launch using the integration from the SDK, so it will be interesting to track that game’s success over the next few months.

This is for work, I swear!

But of course, some Chinese gamers are asking a different question: what games are these public servants playing? The answers, it seems, are pretty similar to what regular Chinese gamers are playing. But if you want to play games like a Chinese government official, here’s what you should be playing:

Casual Games: Fight the Landlord!, Mahjong. No surprises here as these are popular games offline as well (Fight the Landlord is a card game) and they’re very easy to find and play online.

Flash Games: Happy Farm. Needless to say, browser-based flash games are quick popular because they can be exited with one quick click if your boss comes walking around the corner. Chinese public servants are apparently partial to social games like Happy Farm (the Chinese game that Zynga cloned to make Farmville).

PC Games: Demigods and Semi-Devils, Fantasy Journey to the West, Zhuxian, Do Po Cang Qiong. MMORPGs like World of Warcraft don’t see to be as common among Chinese officials as they are among regular Chinese gamers, but clearly public servants have nothing against historical-fantasy-style RPGs.

Multiplayer Competitive Games: DOTA, League of Legends. Yup, even Chinese officials aren’t immune to China’s DOTA craze, apparently. So watch out the next time you fire up a game of League of Legends with strangers; your teammates might just be the people who are supposed to be running your city!

Mobile Games: Fruit Ninja, Fishing Master, Temple Run. Here, Chinese officials are basically just reflecting what the top free game downloads are on Chinese app stores, so these titles shouldn’t come as much of a surprise.

Again, these results come from an investigation with a very small sample size, so take them with a grain of salt. But if other Chinese public servants game like these guys apparently do, then Chinese officials are playing more or less the same games as regular Chinese gamers.

(via QQ Games)

North Korea’s missile belligerence has been the target of an awful lot of humor, but the folks at Taiwan’s Next Media Animation have taken things a step farther and gone interactive with Best Korea Smackdown, a flash game that tasks players with shooting down North Korean nukes as Kim Jong Un attempts to ride them into their targets.

The game is extremely simple, and it’s really more of a gimmick than it is a game. Gameplay involves pointing the mouse at incoming missiles, clicking, and then releasing when your anti-nuke missiles are at maximum power to try and shoot down Kim’s missile nukes. Your anti-nuke missiles seem to feel the effects of gravity very heavily, but you only have to survive for less than a minute, and the first time I played the game, I beat it by accident. It’s the sort of thing that’s good for a laugh, but you’re not likely to play it more than once.

It seems that NMA is taking the game somewhat seriously though, as it’s available in Chinese and Japanese in addition to English. And since it’s built in HTML5, it will even work on mobile devices, so you can shoot down Fatty Kim’s nukes on the go if you really want to.

Puzzle/RPG hybrid Puzzle & Dragons and messenger app Line aren’t the only hypes in Japan’s smartphone world right now.

The third big name that must be mentioned in this context is Nameko Saibai, a series of super-quirky smartphone games that center on cute mushroom characters (nameko is a special mushroom, while saibai means cultivation).

Tokyo-based Beeworks probably didn’t know they were to produce the country’s first really big smartphone game when they launched the first Nameko title, namely Nameko Saibai Kit (English version: “Mushroom Garden” or “Funghi Gardening Kit”) in June 2011 on iOS – eight months before Puzzle & Dragons.

Today, if there is one company that can be labeled as a Japanese counterpart of the makers of Angry Birds, Rovio, it’s Beeworks – albeit on a small scale.

The first game in the franchise

As the title suggests, players need to grow mushrooms on a piece of wood, and wait a while for them to grow before harvesting them by swiping over the screen. There are varieties of Nameko, some of which are harder to get than others. The goal of the game is to “collect them all”. There is basically no real game play, no high-quality graphics or music (quite the contrary), and no social hooks.

Reasons I heard from Japanese players why they like the game so much include “I like the feeling of swiping over the screen to harvest the mushrooms”, “The Namekos are so cute”, and “I love how they say NNFF NNFF when I harvest them”.

This first Nameko game took Japan by storm (without any marketing at the start) and currently boasts 11 million downloads across iOS and Android, putting it in Puzzle & Dragons territory.

Variations on a theme

Much like Rovio with its numerous editions of Angry Birds, Beeworks was very clever in creating variations of essentially the same game and making use of its existing user base for distribution. There are two different versions in addition to the original, namely Nameko Saibai Kit Seasons (users can harvest different mushrooms, depending on the season) and Nameko Saibai Kit Deluxe (which has some improvements, i.e. BGM).

Beeworks has been seeing considerable success with this strategy, in Japan and some Asian countries. The company is offering English versions of Nameko (on iOS and Android), but success outside Asia has been limited so far. As of April 7 this year, all Nameko Saibai Kit games have been downloaded 30,192,789 million times worldwide.

Parallels to Rovio

The Japanese developer can’t think in billions like Rovio does, but the numbers above are pretty impressive, and there are a few parallels between the two companies. For instance, much like Rovio, Beeworks was a small company that was around for a long time but largely unknown before landing its first real big hit (Beeworks was established in 1998, Rovio in 2003).

Both companies rolled out variations of their hits in quick succession and cross-promoted them inside the existing user base: the “Seasons” versions even share the exact same name and idea. Both franchises are specifically made for touch screens, feature “character-focused” design, come with a low learning curve and with extra-cute graphics and sound.

But the biggest parallel can actually be found somewhere else.

Nameko’s popularity in Japan made it possible for Beeworks to build a successful merchandising business around its IP: there are now Nameko-themed toys, phone cases, stationery, key holders, clothes, music CDs (yes, really), candy, coffee mugs, manga, furniture, slippers, etc.

The line-up of official Nameko goods can be found here (the list is not even complete: for example, it doesn’t show there are special Nameko stickers available for Line, too).

What’s interesting (and a big difference to Angry Birds) is that all Nameko games are entirely free: there are no download fees, no premium versions, and no in-app purchases. In addition, Beeworks is relatively easy on the ads, a lot of which are just used to drive traffic from one Nameko game to the other.

The strategy here is to bring the game in front of as many eyeballs as possible and make money (almost) entirely with non-game related products later.

Beeworks isn’t saying how well this is working, but anecdotally speaking, I can see the strategy of building a character goods business on top of a free game series succeeding – at least here in “character-crazy” Japan (the title’s Facebook page offers a lot of hints). I even believe the life cycle of the Nameko merchandising business could be longer than that of the apps, which may be something Rovio is betting on as well with Angry Birds.

But so far, the game itself is still working: social games specialist Chiho Komoriya (who is part of a family of farmers in Akita prefecture) goes so far as to say Nameko’s popularity is responsible for the recent increase in demand for real nameko mushrooms in the country.

Money, murder, manga, and several other things that regrettably do not begin with “m” dominated this week’s Asia tech news. Plus, with hundreds of millions in the continent devoted to their social messaging apps, it’s no surprise that we also saw major developments from Line, KakaoTalk, and WeChat.

Willis’ pick: CocCoc: Russian-Financed Search Engine To Spend $100 Million to Beat Google in Vietnam

To invest $100 million in a local search engine is kinda bold. That’s what the Russians did for Vietnam’s CocCoc this week. It’s big news because this sort of investment hardly ever happens at the local level in Southeast Asia. That said, I don’t think it’s a silly investment either. Vietnam’s internet penetration is on the rise and from what I understood from Minh, our American-Vietnamese correspondent, CocCoc does serve Vietnamese users much better than Google. Plus, online search ads in Vietnam is probably worth more than $100 million.

Vanessa’s pick: Taiwanese Gamer Witnesses Murder in Internet Cafe, Keeps Playing Games in Bloodstained Clothes

I felt the need to share this piece of news on all my social networks due to the prevalence of Genovese syndrome in our society these days. How can anyone, especially in such close proximity, not give assistance or seek help when someone is being stabbed to death? It gets creepy when your gameplay takes precedence over someone’s life and it shows how screwed up her values are, doesn’t it?

Minh’s pick: VietnamWorks, Vietnam’s Top Online Recruitment Site, Gets Acquired By En-Japan

This is probably the biggest news in Vietnam for the week, especially considering that CareerBuilder bought VON in February in a similarly expansionist move. This means that the job recruitment scene in Vietnam is accelerating and it’s really nice to see some exits for companies in Vietnam. This will be inspiring for startups who want to make it big in the country and it’s confirmation that the Vietnamese market does have meat to it.

Emily’s pick: Line Enters E-Book Business With Line Manga

It’s really great to see messaging apps, like Line, venturing into new services. First it was games, and now it’s manga! I won’t say that it is exactly innovative, but it might be advantageous to tap into the pretty huge market of manga readers. It is also interesting to note that KakaoTalk also launched its new KakaoPage publishing platform which allows anyone to create and distribute content.

Enricko’s pick: No Funding, No Rich Daddy, Founder of M-Stars in Indonesia Started Up His Way

Another inspiring story written by Minghao about an Indonesian startup that made its exit, albeit a forced one. One big thing that everyone needs to remind themselves of is the dedication and hard work these founders must put in to get to the state they are in. M-Stars Group’s Joseph Edi Lumban Gaol had to borrow money from family to pay his employees in the early days and spent a lot of sleepless nights fretting over how to keep the company afloat. I have nothing but respect for the guy.

Charlie’s and Steven’s pick: Out of 300 Million Total, Tencent’s WeChat Has 40 Million Overseas Users

Charlie: I’ve been wondering for a while how many of WeChat’s 300 million users were overseas users, and now we know. Just getting to 40 million is an impressive accomplishment, but if Tencent can maintain this growth, I’ll be even more impressed – and, honestly, a little surprised.

Steven: I’ve also been waiting for this kind of official stat. While it’s a fairly good figure, it shows that the global reach of Whatsapp and Line is actually far greater than WeChat’s. But it’s still early days as Tencent WeChat has only had an English name and an overseas audience for a little under 12 months.

Andrew’s pick: WeChat Squashes Rumor: We’re Free to Use

This piece of news indeed put millions of WeChat users at ease. I can’t help but to agree that users shouldn’t pay just to enjoy the service of the biggest mobile chat app in China. However, from the telcos’ perspective, someone has to foot the bill for all that extra data usage on its networks. This battle is not over yet.

Minghao’s pick: KakaoTalk Hits Number 1 Spot in Indonesia’s App Stores and is Looking for Local Partners

Last year, we see strong initiatives from NHN’s Line and Tencent’s WeChat in Indonesia. Now we have a new challenger heading into the world’s fourth most populated country. Looks like an intense fight for market share is about to erupt – or has it already started?

Youshen’s pick: Google Apps for Education to Reach 10 Million Malaysians in New Education Program

It is astonishing to have 10 million Malaysian students, teachers and parents to be deployed on the web-based collaboration suite, Google Apps for Education. I would have expected this move myself given that Thailand, the Philippines, Singapore and India have already “Gone Google”. Worldwide, we see similar adoption by universities such as Stanford, Brown, and UC Berkeley. Targeted at students across 10,000 Malaysian schools, I will also agree that Chromebooks are a great way to learn on and easily access Google Apps for Education.

For other ways of reading us, perhaps try our tailored RSS feeds, or find us within the Flipboard or Google Currents apps.

I’ve written a lot recently about murders revolving around video games in China (i.e. this, this, this, and this), but the latest gruesome story comes from Taiwan, and it involves gamers being not so much horrifyingly violent as horrifyingly indifferent.

On April 3, an 18-year-old walked into an internet cafe in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, and stabbed a man several years older than him to death with a watermelon knife. The crime was caught on the internet cafe’s surveillance camera, and nearly as concerning as the murder itself is the fact that none of the many bystanders in the internet cafe (you can see some of them in the image above, milling around immediately after the murder had been committed) attempted to stop it from happening. Even more extreme, one female gamer (that’s her in the top right in the image below) ignored the crime completely and continued to play games even through the crime happened so close to her that blood had splattered onto her clothes, according to eyewitnesses.

It’s hard to imagine what game could be so engrossing that you don’t want to quit even when blood is quite literally flying around you, and the Shenzhen Satellite TV station’s news report on the incident doesn’t report that or interview the girl directly.

(Shenzhen Satellite TV)

The hype around Japan’s most popular mobile game Puzzle and Dragons, which is estimated to generate a mind-blowing US$62 to $86 million per month (or more) in sales, continues.

According to maker GungHo, the RPG/puzzle hybrid game now boasts 12 million registered players in Japan (the company doesn’t say how many users the game has abroad).

It took Puzzle and Dragons a total of 15 days to go from eleven to twelve million users. Here’s a chart we made of the game’s growth using data from Japanese news site Social Game Info:

One day after the game hit 11 million users, on March 26, GungHo started a new TV ad campaign.

What’s interesting about Puzzle and Dragons is that this is the tenth time in a row the title attracted one million users in less than three weeks. This development started in October last year, just after the Android version was released and GungHo started advertising the game on TV for the first time.

Singapore-based mobile social gaming and entertainment company FunSpot announced today that it has signed a partnership agreement with Indonesia’s largest telco Telkomsel to bring FunSpot’s services in neighboring Indonesia. The agreement, according to the statement, will see FunSpot providing Telkomsel’s customers with a fully integrated mobile social gaming network in the Indonesian language and nine mobile social games. It looks like this latest deal will pit FunSpot head to head with another mobile social gaming platform Kotagames (by TMG) for the Indonesian market.

With around 125 million Telkomsel subscribers in the country, there’s still plenty of room for the two companies to share. But it seems like their battleground is not only in Indonesia as they are both eyeing stakes in the Southeast Asian market. Note that Singaporean telco Singtel has invested in Kotagames and it also owns a 35 percent stake in Telkomsel. This could make FunSpot’s partnership with Telkomsel a little tricky as there is a potential conflict of interest.

One thing that could make FunSpot more appealing than Kotagames though, is the company’s feature which lets users share media files via the website. You can see some of them being shared and commented on by a few users in FunSpot’s Indonesian mobile site here. I don’t think that feature is available on Kotagames.

Kotagames itself is definitely keeping its presence felt in Indonesia by currently holding to six million users so far, with around 90 percent of them as feature phone users. With the huge pie in Indonesia, FunSpot’s emergence in the country shouldn’t deter Kotagames’ 10 million user target by the end of this year.

(UPDATE: Tencent responds by saying: “Tencent is in the process of building a mobile games open platform, which is positioned to increase engagement with mobile Internet users — both wireless QQ and Weixin/WeChat. To facilitate the testing of our new open platform, we are developing some games internally and also sourcing from third-party game developers. We are in the early stage of preparation, and have not released any screenshots or images of these games. As the largest game platform in China, we have deep respect for intellectual property and will work with related parties to enforce intellectual property protection on our game platforms.”).

As with platforms like Apple’s Game Center, or the gaming elements of rival chat apps KakaoTalk and Line, the titles will require gamers to sign in – this time with a WeChat (or a Tencent QQ) username – so that you can challenge buddies within the game. The leaked photos, as seen on iFanr, show three similarly named casual games. They’re called WePang (seems like a bit of a rip-off of Anipang, which in turn is basically just Popcap’s Bejeweled), WeLink, and a parkour game called WeRunner:

Tencent is already China’s top gaming company by revenue, with a range of both casual and hardcore games across numerous platforms. But its QQ-based social gaming, which is hugely important to the company’s revenue, is reliant on desktop gaming and its old-style QQ IM service, so Tencent needs to brings its game face to mobile with its popular WeChat app.

WeChat has over 300 million users in total, of which about 40 million are outside of China.

(Source: iFanr – article in Chinese)

California-based game studio Kabam has set up a $50 million fund aimed at getting Japanese games into the Western markets of Europe and the US. Kabam’s fund will also involve assistance in localizing and translating games for export, marketing the titles, and helping developers with analytics on their game’s performance.

As noted by the WSJ, the new Kabam fund and platform puts the studio into competition with Japanese social gaming giants GREE and DeNA for the affection and allegiance of Japanese developers.

Since Kabam pitches itself as a maker of social games for hardcore gamers – not for bizarre and fairly simple games like Battle Cats – it’ll likely be more interested in promoting titles like its popular and free-to-play Kingdoms of Camelot. So this news might be positive for Japanese developers who make more complex titles like the card battle game Rage of Bahamut.

“We’re putting our money where our mouth is,” said Kabam CEO Kevin Chou, who added that a Japanese game developer can double revenue by achieving success in western markets. Although Japanese smartphone owners are great for paying up for games, the prospect of doubling the money will appeal to a lot of startup studios in Japan.

Kabam also has a Beijing studio, where it now employs nearly a hundred people after boosting numbers in December with the acquisition of Balanced Worlds. Kabam acquired two other properties last year after a $85 million series D funding round helped fuel aggressive expansion.

Kabam made more than $180 million in revenue in 2012 and now has 600 employees across the US and China.

(Source: WSJ Japan Realtime blog)

According to data released by Tokyo-based game magazine publisher Enterbrain (published in The Nikkei over the weekend), the Japanese market for video games grew 1.2 percent to US$4.6 billion in fiscal year 2012 (which ended on March 31, 2013).

Software sales for gaming consoles and handhelds contracted 1.2 percent to $2.8 billion in that time frame.

But hardware sales increased five percent to about $1.8 billion in Japan, thanks to the introduction of the Wii U (well, OK, if the report says so), a new 3DS, and Sony’s recent price cuts for their consoles.

What’s interesting is that while a 1.2 percent plus sounds pretty modest, the overall market for video games in Japan grew for the first time in five years. Enterbrain’s numbers for the first half of fiscal 2012 were already indicating such a trend.

And what’s even more interesting is that even though different data providers use different methods, it looks like the sizes of the video and social gaming markets in Japan are now very similar.

The latest report of note came from Yano Research in January, estimating the social gaming market in Japan was worth $4.3 billion in 2012. Even though that number is closer to $4 billion using today’s exchange rate, that market grew faster between 2011 and 2012 than the one for video games, making the difference not that big anymore.

While Android is on the rise in Southeast Asia, it’s still a very fragmented market. There are lots of feature phone users and browser-based games as well. To discuss this, we have onstage (pictured left to right):

• Tetsuya Mori, managing director at DeNA Asia
• Evan Spytma, regional director at Popcap Games
• Alvin Yap, founder at TMG

All three are good friends of the blog – and important figures in this very mixed mobile gaming landscape. Our guest moderator is Anton Soeharyo, founder at gaming studio Touchten. Here’s the Startup Asia live blog:

#12:17: Mori-san says that, in Southeast Asia, Singapore is “very important and unique” and it’s the hub for the region. A good play for the affection of the local audience! Meanwhile, DeNA (TYO:2432) has been active and acquiring in Vietnam.

#12:19: Evan says that it’s focusing on Indonesia where it’s expanding a lot, and also in the Philippines where he’ll be relocating too. China is a big area for PopCap too.

#12:20: Alvin: Indonesia is number one priority for TMG, and then Thailand, the Philippines, and also India – all major places for finding feature phone users.

#12:21: Alvin: For localization, SEA is a challenge. For example: the Philippines is more like a western market in terms of gamers’ likes and dislikes. For his startup, language versions, especially, Thai, is a difficult aspect to adapt.

#12:23: Evan: For China, they opt to break down the games into in-app sections for easier monetization. Chinese consumers like in-app purchasing so that a game can be free/low cost.

#12:24: In contrast, for Japan, Evan says that PopCap had to focus on characterization in the games – such as the way it put characters into Bejeweled, which included “attractive women – which is needed in a game in Japan”.

#12:25: Mori-san explains that DeNA continuously develops, tweaks, and localizes almost weekly. And, yes, the games do need sexy girls in them.

#12:27: Anton concurs with Evan that cultural adaptation is important, and he targets that aspect at TouchTen as well.

#12:28: As for handsets, DeNA focuses on iOS and Android. Evan says that feature phones are still present, but not in major markets like China. As Evan read here on Techinasia, Android makes up about 86 percent of smartphone sales in China.

#12:30: Alvin says that in his markets, even Android users are on very basic, low-budget phones.

#12:30: So, when to abandon Flash games and not-so-smart-phones, asks Anton. Alvin says there are still users for them to find, and money to make, on feature phones. But he’s still keen to “find his feet” in the regional smartphone sector.

#12:32: Evan: Yes, feature phones are still 60 percent of the market across the whole region, because there’s still a $100 price difference between basic phones and even cheap Android devices.

#12:35: Mori: DeNA has pretty much abandoned feature phones. No ROI in it. He says the tipping point to smartphone domination will happen everywhere eventually. Even India might seem to have low smartphone penetration, but he reckons it’ll happen soon enough. Varies by each country.

#12:36: Evan: We need to think to the next step beyond smartphones – to multi-screens or whatever’s next. Smartphones are a no-brainer. His personal view: more about looking at games that can be used across all platform. That will create new business models, and those can be leveraged in SEA.

#12:38: Alvin: TMG has 2.6 or 2.7 million users, and now boosted by

12►

#12:41: Alvin is now talking about Thailand where’s there’s a high ARPU. It’s the highest ARPU for TMG. India and Indonesia less so.

#12:42: Mori: DeNA is looking at Vietnam more for its team and developers, making games for the Japanese market. The returns could be huge if a game really takes off in Japan. DeNA works with VNG, and VNG even does the Japanese language aspects, so it’s all made with its local partner. He says the results are “impressive”. So “95 percent of the code is done by Vietnamese guys” – but the games are not really made for Vietnamese gamers.

#12:44: Anton asks if the three panelists have any SEA horror stories in terms of developers and biz dev hassles? Alvin says it’s hardest to explain to outsiders how the market works and how he can monetize. Mori-san tells of one Indian game developer who didn’t want to meet in India as he was wanted by Indian police. As for Evan, he finds that being blatantly ripped off in China is a big pain. E.g.: One rip-off company using PopCap artwork explained that if they shut down because of PopCap’s cease-and-desist letter, they’ll get on a bus and drive to PopCap to destroy the company in the same way that the legal threat would ruin the pirate’s company. Stay classy, China.

#12:49: And on that bombshell, that’s the end of the live blog.

This is a part of our coverage of Startup Asia Singapore 2013, our event running on April 4 and 5. For all our newest Startup Arena pitches, see here. You can follow along on Twitter at @techinasia, and on our Facebook page.

Of course, in doing so, Netease is also helping itself. The company is the official operator for Blizzard games like Starcraft 2, which are hugely popular among competitive gamers. DOTA-like games are also hugely popular in the e-sports arena, and not coincidentally, Netease will be releasing its own DOTA clone called Heroes of the Three Kingdoms next week. Netease is likely hoping that with the help of government organizations like the General Administration of Sport of China, it can establish Heroes of the Three Kingdoms as the DOTA game of choice for domestic gaming competitions.

In fact, Tuesday’s press conference seems to have been used in part as a promotional event for Heroes of the Three Kingdoms, with time devoted set aside for the game developers to talk about the game and the development process. It sounds interesting, and I’ll hopefully be taking a closer look at it next week, but all the self-promotion makes it a little hard to take Netease’s rhetoric about helping domestic e-sports all that seriously.

The bigger question, though, is to what extent competitive gaming can really catch on in China. As of now, it certainly hasn’t managed to capture anything approaching a mainstream audience, but it also hasn’t been promoted that heavily outside of a few niches. Could e-sports ever rival the popularity of (forgive me) real sports like soccer or basketball in China? Personally, I’m pretty skeptical, but stranger things have happened. I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see.

(via Netease Games)

Signs announcing the shift to mobile gaming in the Linekong offices.

Earlier this week, Linekong Online was one of China’s best known and biggest developers of web games. But today, the company is no longer a web game developer at all. On Tuesday afternoon, the company unveiled a new strategic focus that will see Linekong shifting completely into mobile games. “Please call us a mobile games company!” blares a banner that was hung in the Linekong offices Tuesday afternoon as the company celebrated the shift.

CEO Wang Feng sees it as a daring, risky move. “This is the most bold and crazy risk our company has taken in our six years in business,” he wrote on his weibo account. The company is not entirely abandoning its old model — it will continue to operate and update already-released games like Warrior King and Journey to the West Online. But all new titles will be mobile games. Wang says the company aims to release six new games in 2013.

Personally I’m not sure the move is as bold and crazy as Wang’s suggesting; China’s mobile game market is big (though not as big as you might think) and growing, so any serious game developer should be looking at it carefully. Moreover, Linekong has released mobile games before, so it won’t exactly be starting from square one in the mobile arena. Still, a wholesale switch this abrupt is pretty rare, and it will be interesting to see whether Linekong can bring its PC gamers over to the mobile platform or whether it will have to attract a whole new audience for its mobile games.

(via TechWeb)

Japanese game developer and publisher Nijibox announced on Monday that there are a few personnel changes for the company’s key positions. During this opportunity the company also told us about its latest development: it’s got five million users.

Since Nijibox’s inception in November 2011, the company has gathered an average of 400,000 active users every month across its 46 game titles. 18 percent of users downloaded the game directly onto feature phones, 42 percent from smartphone downloads, and the rest comes from Nijibox’s partnership with gaming platforms worldwide.

Nijibox has achieved quite a feat in Indonesia too, reaching 1.5 million users in December, only five months since the company launched two game titles, Monster Fantasia and Costume Fantasia, last year. Both are card battle games, Monster Fantasia lets you play as a monster tamer and save the world while in Costume Fantasia, you get to save the world by rescuing beautiful ladies first. The company’s monthly revenue in Indonesia also increased 620 percent in that five month period.

Nijibox recently launched its third Fantasia card battle game title in Indonesia called Legend of Fantasia. Set in the future, you get to save the world by fighting off alien invaders.

Founder and CEO Yoichi Aso now holds two more strategic positions as president and representative director. As TMG founder Alvin Yap puts it to fellow entrepreneurs, we hope Yoichi can still get enough sleep.

China’s casual and social gamers are growing by the day, especially on mobile platforms. But what about the country’s more hardcore gaming contingent? These days, an awful lot of them are playing Defense of the Ancients-style games. Defense of the Ancients (now often called DOTA) began as a mod for the real-time strategy game Warcraft 3 (which was hugely popular in China) and eventually became so popular that it spawned a whole host of similar games and, some would argue, essentially created a new genre of game in the process.

DOTA, its sequel, and League of Legends are currently among the most popular games both in China and internationally, but Chinese game operator Tiaoyue is hoping that its new game 300 Heroes can pull Chinese players away from League of Legends. The game is nearly completed, with features already locked, and it enters the final round of internal testing this week. A playable beta is also available on the game’s official site.

Visually and in terms of gameplay, 300 Heroes bears a striking resemblance to League of Legends, something that China’s gaming press has not shied away from pointing out. But the the game does offer one thing League of Legends and other DOTA games definitely don’t: Chinese heroes. In addition to a plethora of wholly fictional characters, 300 Heroes players will be able to select famous historical characters like Zhuge Liang (a famous military strategist from the Three Kingdoms period) and Xuanzang (a famous monk and traveler from the Tang dynasty) as well as famous characters from Chinese fiction like the beauty Diaochan and “Pigsy” from Journey to the West.

Although despite the title it seems the game will only offer 37 heroes at launch, don’t count 300 Heroes out if its gameplay is polished enough to be comparable to League of Legends. Many of its characters are extremely popular in China and could genuinely pull some players away from Western-developed DOTA games if the gameplay is otherwise comparable.

In that way, 300 Heroes offers an important lesson to anyone planning to launch or localize a game for China: localization isn’t just about the language. There is a reason, after all, that so many Chinese RPGs are based on famous Chinese historical periods or popular novels like Journey to the West: Chinese gamers love that stuff. This is not to say that they don’t also like new things, of course, but the call of the familiar can be powerful. Doing something like adding characters Chinese players are familiar with to a game can really make the game more appealing and less intimidating to new players, especially in DOTA-style games where there are generally dozens of characters to choose from.

Anyway, we’ll be keeping an eye on 300 Heroes to see if it can capture the hearts and minds of China’s DOTA-loving online gaming crowd, or whether even the tactical brilliance of Zhuge Liang can’t save it from being “just another DOTA clone.”

Ah Mao (not his real name) has a problem with online games: he can’t stop playing them. But luckily for him and his family and friends, his solution — unlike some other people — was not to murder anyone but rather to try to have himself arrested. His crime? Playing too many video games.

22-year-old Ah Mao says his problem started back in May of 2009, when he discovered Hot-Blooded Fantasy, an RPG game from Shanda that was popular on unofficial private servers. To say that Ah Mao liked the game would be an understatement; he stayed in the internet cafe for a full eight days and nights playing it. He later moved on to other games like Tencent’s QQ Racing and Netease’s Fantasy Journey to the West. As time went on, he got into games on YY and things got worse. Virtually every dollar he earned was going to games.

To his credit, though, Ah Mao has been aware for some time that he had a problem. When his laptop was stolen, he didn’t buy a new one for fear it would only facilitate his gaming habits. He sold his smartphone and replaced it with an old-school Nokia that can barely run Snake. He found a job that required long hours daily in the hopes that it would keep him from gaming too much. But unfortunately, it seemed like every time he got paid, he went on a bender.

His latest was in late March. Starting on the 26th, he spent several days in an internet cafe playing games, and when he emerged on the 29 he decided since it was clear he had no self-control, it was time for the police to get involved. He called 110 — China’s emergency number for crimes — and said, “Come arrest me and lock me up for a few months, I cannot keep myself off of the internet.”

The operator suggested he go to a local police substation, where he met with officers and a counselor. Needless to say, they refused to actually throw him in prison, but the counselor did recommend a three-step approach to recovery based on creating distance, self-control, and supervision. Ah Mao has already tried the first two, of course, but he has lacked external supervision. With the help of family and friends, he may finally be able to kick the habit.

I’ve written a number of stories about game addiction over the past month, and I want to clarify that I’m not suggesting games themselves are the problem. I’m a gamer myself (most recently I have been playing Bioshock Infinite) and I have nothing against games. What I’m trying to drive home with this article and others like it is that gaming addiction is a real problem, and it’s something that Chinese society takes pretty seriously but hasn’t really figured out how to handle yet. You may recall the horror stories from several years ago about China’s game addict boot camps, or that China is currently working on its own conditions for diagnosing game addiction, but it’s clear that some people out there need more than what’s currently available.

(Jiangsu Online via QQ Games)

Bali-based game developer Dragon Game Studio has been quite busy recently, releasing its first-ever two games in the last couple of days. The new startup is using the hype around two global dance crazes in its first game, called Harlem Shake Vs. Gangnam Style. The second title is Don’t Steal My Banana. We talked with the studio’s co-founder, Sweden-born Jonas Johnsson, who says he decided to build his life with his wife and co-founder Joan Johnsson in Bali whilst also taking a plunge into the gaming industry.

I gave both games a try and saw that they both have the same kind of quirky graphics which are quite nice. Both are casual games; Harlem Shake Vs. Gangnam Style! is a very simple one. You just need to tap at the correct time while listening to the beat of either the Harlem Shake or Gangnam Style songs. Jonas says that they made their own versions of both the songs so that they won’t have too much trouble with intellectual property rights.

Don’t Steal My Banana is also quite straight-forward, but I found it more fun with interesting character level-ups and weapon alternatives to choose from. In the game you need to protect your giant banana from the horde of animals approaching you by throwing fruit – including with Indonesian speciality, the durian.

Jonas says that those two games are just side projects for Dragon Game Studio. Their main project is the upcoming BaliFied – Word Game of the Gods. He explained further:

It shows the love we have for Bali and we’ve turned some beautiful Balinese scenery into graphics which are used as backgrounds in the game. It’s going to be our masterpiece and we are planning to release it in June 2013.

Any game that showcases Indonesian culture sounds great by me. Until then, you can download Harlem Shake Vs. Gangnam Style for free on iTunes or Google Play. You can also give Don’t Steal My Banana a try on iOS and Android.

The company did have some success in mobile gaming in 2012, but its users came primarily via the iOS platform, and since China has way more Android users than iOS users, a harder push into the Android gaming market could yield bigger rewards, although it is also a more crowded and disjointed market. Renren CEO Chen Yizhou said that Renren will be pushing to create a “powerful product line” in Android games.

The move comes at a time when Renren is finding its web-based social network increasingly edged out of users’ online habits by newer and more mobile social products like Sina Weibo and Tencent’s WeChat. The company’s stock has not performed particularly well, and there were even rumors of layoffs at the company late last year. But the company reportedly still has around 700 people in its games department spread out through several offices around the globe, so it should be in a good position to produce and distribute Android games.

Whether or not users will flock to those games is another question entirely, though. China’s Android market is fragmented across dozens of app stores, and competition for users and revenue in the gaming sector is fierce. Plus, as we saw yesterday, China’s young gamers aren’t quite as into mobile gaming as some might expect.

(via Sina Tech)

If you had any doubts about how serious gaming addiction can be — and you shouldn’t, given the number of game-related murders we’ve written about recently — here’s a terrifying story that will set you straight.

24-year-old Guangdong resident Xie Huachang met his girlfriend “Xiao Hui” (not her real name) in March of 2011 while playing games online. The two hit it off, and by year’s end they were living together. But Xie was not just a gaming enthusiast, he was a fanatic, and his devotion to games started causing friction. By March of 2012, Xiao Hui had given up on the relationship and met a new boyfriend online, and in May, she decided to move to Shenzhen to be with him.

Unfortunately, she was still living with Xie, who wasn’t happy about the breakup or her impending departure. One morning in June, as she packed her things to leave for good, he stood in the doorway tearfully begging her not to go. When she refused, his sadness turned to anger. Xie grabbed her by the throat and threw her onto the bed, continuing to strangle her until she had stopped moving and her face had turned purple. She was dead.

Rather than turning himself in or fleeing, Xie then stole Xiao Hui’s bank card and hid her corpse under the bed. He took 300 RMB ($47) out of her account from a nearby ATM, and went to an internet cafe to play video games. He spent the night there, but at around seven the next morning he returned to the room and slipped Xiao Hui’s card back into her wallet. Then he went back to the internet cafe to play more games.

Around noon, he suddenly felt like committing suicide, and went to jump off the roof of a relative’s building before thinking better of it. He sent two text messages, one confessing to the police, and the other to Xiao Hui’s new boyfriend, informing him that she was dead. Two hours later, he was in police custody.

Xie’s case finally came to a close in court this month, and he was sentenced to life in prison. He was also ordered to pay a sum of restitution to Xiao Hui’s family. His regretful attitude about his crime is apparently responsible for his rather lenient (by Chinese standards) sentence, but his case is yet another indicator of the extreme lengths addicts will sometimes go to get a fix. Xie’s gaming addiction sabotaged his relationship with Xiao Hui, and the pull of games was apparently so strong Xie’s response to having committed murder was to steal his dead girlfriend’s money so he could play games for a full 24 hours before much else even occurred to him.

(Guangzhou Daily via QQ Games, image from the film Bangkok Haunted 2: The Unborn)

Dr. Serkan Toto is a gaming expert and independent consultant based in Tokyo. You can follow him on Twitter and his blog. This article is republished with his permission.

The crazy Puzzle and Dragons boom in Japan continues – and it gets even crazier.

Maker GungHo (3765.OS) posted a new financial document according to which sales in February for the company reached an almost unbelievable 10 billion yen in February – up 1,280 percent year-on-year. That is US$106 million. In a month with 28 days.

In January (31 days), GungHo, which is soon to be turned into a subsidiary of carrier SoftBank, reported sales of just US$92 million.

Before you say this is impossible, remember the company isn’t private. It’s listed on the Osaka Stock Exchange – in other words, GungHo cannot make financials up.

As last month, there is no discussion in Japan’s gaming industry that Puzzle and Dragons is the main driver behind this growth. Back then I summarized a few reports in gaming media over here, estimating that the puzzle/RPG hybrid alone racked up between $54 million to $75 million in January – or between 59 percent and 81 percent of GungHo’s sales in that month. (As a side note, that would roughly be my estimated range as well).

Applying this to the $106 million the company made last month, this would mean that Puzzle and Dragons alone generated $62 million to $86 million.

As I mentioned earlier, I have seen many hard-to-believe numbers in Japan’s mobile gaming industry, but this game tops everything. That revenue is generated by nine to ten million registered users the title had in February on both iOS and Android.

Seeing that Puzzle and Dragons is still growing steadily, revenue will probably be higher in March , which has three more money-making days than February.

We’re always keeping our eyes out for interesting and surprising data about China’s games industry, and yesterday, we found a gold mine. A new report focused on China’s teen and twenty-something online gamers from iResearch and QQ Games has surveyed more than 5,000 gamers and done in-depth research on dozens more to present the most in-depth picture we’ve yet seen of young Chinese gamers’ demographics, habits, and desires.

It’s not all exactly what you’d expect, either. Mobile gaming is less popular with the youngsters than you might expect. Teen gamers spend more on up front fees and way less on in-game items than you’d think when listening to industry bigwigs blathering about “freemium” and the demise of the traditional pay-for-it-up-front game. Whether you’re a game developer or someone looking to market to Chinese gamers, there is real insight in this report. Unfortunately, it’s only available in Chinese, but there’s so much of value in there that I spent a whole day picking the report apart and creating the massive infographic you see below with some of the most interesting, useful, and surprising charts and statistics.

If you read Chinese, the full report is absolutely worth checking out, although be warned: it is long.

(Full Report Available Here, Chinese only)

This is big: Japanese telecommunications giant SoftBank (TYO:9984) (the one that acquired Sprint in the US) will launch a tender offer to increase its stake in game studio GungHo Online Entertainment (3765.OS) between April 1 and 26 this year. the deal will be worth over a quarter of a billion dollars. It’s timed to coincide with GungHo conducting a 10-for-1 share split on April 1.

GungHo has produced Puzzle and Dragons, Japan’s most popular smartphone game with over 10 million users. It’s perhaps the most profitable mobile game worldwide, estimated to rack up well over US$50 million per month currently.

A few days ago, GungHo’s market cap reached a mind-blowing $5 billion – more than that of GREE or Mobage operator DeNA.

SoftBank (or SoftBank Mobile, to be more specific) will acquire 6.4 percent of GungHo’s total shares for 25 billion yen ($264 million). With that investment, the telco’s stake in the Puzzle and Dragons maker increases from 33.6 to 58.5 percent.

SoftBank explains:

With this understanding, the company recognized the importance of enhancing mobile content by combining smartphone-focused development capability and infrastructure held by the SoftBank Mobile Group and planning and creating capability in the smartphone game industry held by the target company group to further improve the efficiency in operation of the mobile communications business, profitability and competitiveness.

After the execution of the deal, GungHo will become a SoftBank subsidiary.

SoftBank acquires the shares from a company called Asian Grooves, which is owned by Taizo Son – who is the brother of SoftBank CEO and founder Masayoshi Son (Taizo Son is also chairman at GungHo).

Japan’s NTT Docomo (NYSE:DCM) is buddying up with another giant telco, China Mobile (NYSE:CHL; HKG:0941), to bring its mobile gaming portal to an overseas market for the first time ever. Starting from tomorrow, Docomo’s ‘D Game’ portal, which launched in Tokyo last fall, will launch within China Mobile’s own app store.

Dubbed the China Mobile Market, it’s one of China’s largest third-party app stores (see it here), focusing on Android and feature phone apps and games. The arrival of the D Game portal for China Mobile’s 700 million subscribers will be good news for Japanese developers who publish via Docomo’s platform. An initial 20 titles will launch tomorrow on D Game China [1], from studios like Capcom, Konami, and Square Enix. Its catalog will expand over time.

China Mobile’s app store does support paid apps – via carrier billing, of course – but it’s not clear if the D Game titles will be paid ones. Docomo’s announcement today points out its involvement with Dentsu and NTT Advertising in a Chinese joint-venture called D2C, so it’s likely that the games will monetize via in-game ads.

D Game is part of Docomo’s recent push into content and mobile commerce, along with companion services dubbed dmenu and dmarket [2]. The latter one got a big boost recently with Docomo’s acquisition of a women’s fashion e-commerce site.

China Mobile has just [over 100 million 3G subscribers](Dentsu and NTT Advertising in Japan. Dis), so it has a fairly large smartphone user-base, who are the ones most likely to be keen to snap up Android games.

Let’s start Monday morning with some big numbers. Now that smartphones account for 73.2 percent of all mobiles sold in China, and with many locals opting for Android devices across a variety of price-points, it’s not too big a surprise that China is an Android nation. As neatly outlined in this brand-new infographic, China had 224 million Android users at the end of last year (already three times larger than the number of US fandroids), and is on course for 300 million by the end of this year.

Thanks to the flexibility of Google’s Android OS, various research groups reckon that 86 percent of smartphones sold in China run Android, leaving Apple’s iOS to take much of what remains (12 percent).

Chinese devs dominate apps; Foreign studios make the top games

The Chinese startup behind this infographic is Wandoujia, the third-party Android app store that went global last summer with its SnapPea app for Android-to-desktop syncing. Using the analytical data from its hundreds of millions of individual Android app downloads, Wandoujia reveals an interesting dichotomy when it comes to the top apps and games that Chinese Android users enjoy. This is largely true on iOS as well (1). Essentially, it’s mostly Chinese developers that make the nation’s favorite apps, but foreign gaming studios create China’s most-tapped games.

Indeed, only 10 percent of Wandoujia’s top app downloads are from overseas developers, while 70 percent of the leading games are from outside China’s borders – led by the ever-frantic Temple Run. Chinese giant Tencent makes four of the 10 smash-hit apps, with its WeChat messaging app rising fast to the top alongside Tencent’s old-skool QQ instant messenger app.

Good news for developers is that monetization on Android is finally getting better, especially on games. Here’s the full graphic:

For more fun graphics like this one, check out previous entries in our infographic series.

Recently, the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) released a lengthy and very detailed report on the world of Chinese mobile games. We hope to dig more into the report for future goodies, but the first thing we wanted to share with all you aspiring China game developers out there was a breakdown of exactly who is playing what, by age, by education level, and by location. In its data, CNNIC also helpfully separated the players of online mobile games (i.e. web and HTML5 games that can be played in a browser or that require an internet connection for game functions) from players of regular mobile games (i.e., apps that you download and that run entirely on your phone without needing an internet connection).

Let’s take a look first at the breakdown by age. Note that the percentages here refer to the percent of the total number of gamers who play that kind of game. So, for example, the first column in the graph below tells you that of all the gamers who play regular mobile games, 20.6 percent are under 20 years old.

Now, let’s take a look at the breakdown by education level. It’s interesting to note that apparently the more educated someone is, the more they seem to prefer regular mobile games over online mobile games.

And finally, let’s take a look at what people are playing in the cities versus in the countryside. There shouldn’t be much surprise here; lots more urban people are playing games, and there’s not a big split between online and offline games here.

(Chinese Mobile Gaming User Investigation Report [Chinese only], 2012 CNNIC)

Indonesian game publisher Prodigy Infinitech launched a new game a couple of days ago called Anime Pirates. The game is basically a Facebook-based game that’s based on popular Japanese manga One Piece. After giving the turn-based battle RPG title a try, I find the game somewhat dull and monotonous. On the positive side, it has good graphics and quite a lot of One Piece elements and characters that will make a few die-hard manga fans happy.

But first, let me tell you that I’m not an avid RPG nor One Piece fan, but I do enjoy casual games from time to time. At the start of the Anime Pirates game, there are six character types for you to choose from – from a sword lady to a magician. Then you start to play, and the game’s storyline follows the manga itself. You will also get to participate in elite battles between One Piece main characters, which I think is cool.

After the prologue, you will get your own ship and do your own adventure to become the ultimate pirate king. You will be able to upgrade your ship, and sail from place to place all the while completing given tasks, like fighting off invading pirates. Here comes the boring part – you won’t be able to do anything during the turn-based battles. It’s fully automatic. You get to manage your equipment, and crew before the battle, but that’s it. The nice battle animation can keep you amused for a bit, but after fighting – well, watching – your hero fight all the enemies for a while, it becomes a drag.

I’ve beaten my share of enemies there by just clicking and skipping the story part. There are other parts that might be able to glue a few gamers to Anime Pirates that I haven’t yet tried. Those include fighting against fellow players, building alliances with them, and fighting daily bosses for special prizes. The game developer earns money from players making in-app purchases for gold top-ups.

My colleague Minh, who follows the One Piece story, gave the game a try too. His initial reaction was that it’s potentially disappointing that you don’t get to play as one of the main characters. In his own words, he explains further:

Well, I couldn’t learn anything beyond that you don’t play as One Piece characters, which is potentially disappointing. Especially if you can’t choose a “Devil’s Fruit” character, I’d imagine that’s what most fans would prefer.

Luffy, the main character, ate a Devil’s fruit, which changed his body into rubber. Other people eat different fruits…Some turn into lightning, others can be super slippery. It’s all very comical. Anyway, that’s a central point of the story.

Although the main characters aren’t part of the said “Devil’s Fruit” group, Let’s hope that we can recruit those characters during the game.

You can give the game a go here.

China’s games industry is massive, but along with the massive industry have come massive problems. Chief among those problems is the effect games are having on children. Just within the past few months we’ve seen a debate about whether Chinese net cafes should be age-restricted, read reports suggesting China doesn’t have enough games suitable for children, wondered about the Chinese gaming industry’s overuse of sex, and learned that gaming addiction is a serious enough problem that China will develop its own diagnostic criteria for it. Not to mention the teens we’ve seen attempt to murder and actually murder their parents over internet game-related disputes.

But increasingly, some in the Chinese games industry have been wondering if children well served by a ratings system not unlike the ESRB in the USA, which rates games as “Early Childhood”, “Everyone”, “Everyone 10+”, “Teen”, “Mature 17+”, and “Adults Only” according to their content and how appropriate it is for children.

China does have the “Green Game” system — which is based in both name and concept on the Green Dam censorship software — but there is no specialized organization officially dedicated to rating games, and the result is that even with the Green Game system it’s often unclear to parents whether games are appropriate for their kids. As some gamers pointed out at a meeting with government and industry reps during this year’s Two Meetings, many games have cartoony graphics that look very kid friendly but still contain adult elements like gambling, confusing fees, bawdy jokes, etc.

So does China need something more? Many gamers think so. In a web survey conducted by QQ Games that has drawn over 4,000 respondents (as of this writing), nearly 95 percent said they would support a game ratings system for China. Barely 3 percent oppose the idea.

Unfortunately, creating an effective ratings board wouldn’t that simple a task. In the West, ratings systems are helped by the fact that console gaming is very popular and the games that work on consoles can be relatively easily regulated. But online games, which are hugely popular in China, are more difficult to regulate because anyone with a little coding knowledge can build one and upload it to the web without getting it certified or inspected by anyone. Even if a Chinese ratings board was able to effectively police China’s biggest web game platforms — and that alone would require a huge amount of manpower — it would still have no way to account for games hosted on fringe platforms or just posted to their own websites.

On the other hand, even if a ratings board isn’t a perfect solution, it’s hard to imagine how the creation of one could hurt if it empowers parents to identify at least some of the games that may not be safe for their kids to play. With that said, though, parents should also probably be making an effort to try out some of these games for themselves. Ultimately, that’s the only way you can really be sure if any given game is right for your child.

Online-to-offline e-commerce WeChat integration will be tackled (unsurprisingly) by Tencent’s group buying team. It has already integrated a couple things into the service including a WeChat members card, with which you can get prizes and small discounts for following specific merchants, and a daily deals service through the official WeiTuanGou account.

(As a side note, Online-to-offline e-commerce is often referred to as “O2O,” but I refuse to use that term on the grounds that it is idiotic to use one letter to signify two different words in the same acronym.)

Added-value services could include a lot of things. It’s likely, for example, that WeChat will sell special stickers and emoticons for use in chats. It could also make a more comprehensive set of services and sell them bundled through a membership subscription or something of that nature.

Games, of course, are self explanatory, and we’ve already talked about how WeChat’s gaming platform is going to work when it comes out soon and even taken a look at one early way to play HTML5 games within the WeChat app.

The inspiration for quite a bit of this is obviously KakaoTalk, the Korean chat app that already offers a robust gaming platform. Tencent invested 400 million RMB ($61 million) in KakaoTalk last year, and it has obviously been watching its development closely.

One thing WeChat won’t be doing for monetization is ads, though, as Tencent director Liu Chiping says succeeding with an advertising model can be difficult on mobile because screens are too small and ads eat up too much bandwidth.

(via Sina Tech)

In 2008, Li noticed a bottle of fast-acting poison in the family’s home. It was pesticide, of course, but Li reasoned that it was likely to make his parents sick enough to go to the hospital, and if his parents were in the hospital, he could play games for as long as he wanted without anyone to stop him. So he slipped the poison into their food one day and then slipped out to play games. By the time he returned home, he had gotten his wish: his parents were in the hospital. But unfortunately for Li, the poison was quite strong, and both his father and mother died.

Li was ultimately caught, tried, convicted, and sentenced to 15 years in prison, and although his crime was originally committed almost five years ago, his story made the rounds yesterday in the Chinese media and was even printed in the official People’s Daily. The tone of the story, which was originally published in Henan Fazhi Bao, makes it clear that this is meant to be a cautionary tale. The final line reads: “What awaits Li Tao is not just his legal punishment, but a lifetime of suffering with guilt and pain.”

And while it might seem like a fluke, frequent readers of this site will know better. So far this year we have already seen another Chinese teen who tried to poison his family over not getting enough internet time (he was luckier than Li Tao; none of them died) and a gamer who murdered two people and burned an internet cafe to the ground when the internet cut out during his favorite web game.

So the moral of the story, we guess, is stay the hell away from addicted Chinese gamers, because they will literally kill you.

(Henan Fazhi Bao via QQ Games)

Tencent’s (HKG:0700) full-year 2012 financials came out this evening, showing that the web giant’s mobile services grew a mere 14 percent in terms of revenue in the past year. But that might change in 2013. In the post-earnings conference call that’s still ongoing, Tencent executives confirmed that WeChat, which now has over 300 million users, will get a game platform soon. The official word is:

We are in the process of designing a game platform for WeChat – it’ll be in testing mode in the next few months.

There’s no date set for the launch of WeChat’s gaming platform – which will compete directly with similar platforms on KakaoTalk and Line, both for users and for the affection of game developers – because, a Tencent executive added, “It takes time to get it right for users. (…) We still view user experience as the number one priority (for WeChat).”

Social gaming has been a boon for both KakaoTalk and Line apps since it became incorporated in the popular messaging apps last summer. As seen with hit games like Anipang, the hook-up with the messaging app can bring in millions of users, creating a revenue-share win-win for the game studio and the social app company. That’s likely the area that WeChat will go in.

Tencent is also China’s biggest gaming company in terms of revenue – and, as was just pointed out during the conference call – “China’s biggest mobile publisher by revenue”. So it has nearly a decade of experience in this area.

In terms of Tencent’s general lackluster monetization of mobile, an executive admitted that there are “hurdles in terms of games, platforms” and maybe “a lack of blockbusters” for users to play, but the conference call crew – including chairman and CEO Ma Huateng, and president Martin Lau – pointed out that things can turn around quickly, and “mobile has the lowest cost per unit time, so we look at it as positive.”

For WeChat users, it seems that Tencent is in no rush to monetize, so there won’t be any money-grabbing features appearing in the app. Another possible channel for WeChat is online-to-offline and local services – something long rumored to take the form of mobile payments and perhaps a mobile wallet. On that area of expansion, Martin Lau admitted that very limited testing has taken place for mobile payments with retailers and merchants, but added:

We take a long-term view – there are so many hurdles and a lack of standardization (for payments). So it’s an experiment that we take a lot of interest in, but it takes a long time to see what needs to be done to build a business model on it.

Let us know in the comments if you’re keen to try out WeChat’s gaming platform and any other potential features.

Tencent’s iconic penguin gets to grips with the company’s latest full-year financials.

Hong Kong markets have just closed, and Tencent (HKG:0700), China’s biggest web company, has released its 2012 full-year and Q4 financials. With Tencent hoping to have a global success story with its WeChat messaging app, more eyes than ever are on Tencent. The headline figure from today’s financial report is that full-year revenues were up 54 percent in 2012 to hit US$6.994 billion. Let’s just say $7 billion.

Most of Tencent’s growing revenue ($5.09 billion) was from “internet value-added services”, including things like gaming and virtual products. After all, it’s China’s biggest gaming company as well.

With a growing push into e-commerce, $704.4 million of all that revenue came from its online stores, such as Paipai and its open platform QQ Buy.

Tencent’s operating profits for 2012 stand at $2.46 billion, up 26.3 percent on the 2011 figure.

WeChat and Social

The latest version of the WeChat app

Disappointingly, Tencent made only two bland references to WeChat’s overall progress, mentioning “substantial growth” in 2012 and an emphasis on “marketing investment to acquire users for WeChat” – both of which were obvious already. The financials also said that WeChat Moments – the Path-like social network inside the messaging app – has “enjoyed rapid user adoption.”

On its other social platforms, Tencent reported monthly active users on its Qzone web profiles (sort of a mix of MSN and Facebook) “increased by nine percent year-on-year to 603 million at the end of 2012.” As for its Facebook clone Pengyou site, it saw a 22 percent boost in monthly users to reach 247 million. The ubiquitous QQ instant messenger hit 798 million monthly active users.

In addition, its Twitter-esque Tencent Weibo hit 87 million daily active users by the end of the year. That’s out of its 540 million registered users. But the microblog remains out-hyped by the identically-named Sina Weibo.

Getting back onto the subject of gaming, Tencent’s QQ Game Platform saw peak concurrent users reach 8.8 million in the fourth quarter of 2012. That’s the casual, social gaming side of its many online title offerings.

2013 targets

Looking to the year ahead, Tencent teased possible “applications, games, and location-based activities” arriving in WeChat and its mobile QQ IM apps.

While Tencent might be worried in private that its big earners – stuff like games and advertising – are reliant on desktop and not well adapted to mobile, founder and CEO concludes that he’s pleased with the Shenzhen company’s push onto mobile screens:

During 2012, widespread smartphone adoption brought both disruption and opportunities to the China internet industry. At Tencent, we began to see early results from substantial investments we have made, and continue to make, in mobile internet products. Tencent now provides many of China’s most popular smartphone apps for activities such as communications, social networking, web browsing, games, news, and music, among others. These apps enable us to reach users who are increasingly spending time on smartphones, extend our ecosystem from PCs to mobile, and provide new mobile-specific features unavailable on PCs. During the year, we also introduced a powerful targeted advertising system leveraging our social networks, built the market-leading open platform in partnership with third party developers, diversified our game revenue internationally, and ramped up a sizeable e-commerce business. As a result, we achieved healthy increases in revenue and earnings in 2012, while continuing to invest aggressively in platforms, innovation and technology in order to enhance value to our users and drive long-term growth for our company.

We’ll drop in on Tencent’s post-earnings conference call later and post any juicy details that might emerge.

Find the full report on Tencent’s investor relations page.

Malaysia’s leading payment service giant, MOL, has acquired Indonesia’s AyoPay for an undisclosed sum. AyoPay is a 20-man team business-to-business payment distributor who has been working hand-in-hand with MOL in Indonesia for the last two to three years ever since incorporation.

Specifically, AyoPay helps to distribute MOLPoints, MOL’s online micropayment system for games, to over 40,000 channels — like cybercafes and convenience retailers — in Indonesia. Globally, MOLPoints’s distribution spans over 600,000 channels across over 80 countries worldwide.

Ganesh Kumar Bangah, the founder of MOL, told me on the phone:

We picked AyoPay because they are strong locally and have good networks. We worked with them for the last two to three years as one of our commercial partners and they are distributing our products quite well. The acquisition deepens our relationship and strengthens our manpower in Indonesia.

The entire deal took about six months to complete.

With the acquisition set in stone, AyoPay will keep its brand name and continue to market MOL in Indonesia. Ganesh also confirmed that Indonesia is MOL’s top priority in 2013. While MOL has its eyes set on Indonesia, it is also constantly looking at other lucrative markets, such as Turkey and the Middle East, where it acquired Game Sultan and PaytoGo earlier this month.

(Also read: The Founding Story of MOL)