KakaoTalk Games Platform Sees Massive Growth in Sales and User Counts

South Korean chat app KakaoTalk has offered its mobile gaming platform for a full year now, and statistics the company has released on the platform’s anniversary are quite impressive. From the second half of 2012 to the first half of 2013, the company reports a 194% increase in accumulated sales on its game platform. The platform now has more than 30 million users and 300 million accumulated subscriptions. Not bad for a platform that, just a year ago, only offered 10 games.

KakaoTalk also claims the platform is bolstering indie and startup game development; it says that more than half of its top-grossing titles come out of small and medium-sized shops rather than big-budget developers.

It’s impressive news for KakaoTalk, of course, but it could also be good news for Tencent’s WeChat, which is looking for ways to monetize its service. The company has just begun to launch a gaming platform on WeChat, and KakaoTalk’s rousing success over the past year certainly proves that the business model can work. Of course, it also proves that Tencent and other competitors on the chat app market will have their work cut out for them competing with KakaoTalk anywhere outside of their home countries.

The battle for chat app domination isn’t just about chat apps anymore. In fact, we might ultimately discover that the whole chat thing is fairly superfluous. KakaoTalk’s gaming success shows that the chat app battle might end up being all about the games.