China’s biggest web company by revenue has just posted its Q1 2013 financial report. Tencent (HKG:0700) reports rocketing revenues and profits for the whole group, which covers products across social media, gaming, advertising, e-commerce, media, and more. Tencent’s quarterly revenues hit US$2.161 billion, up 11.5 percent on Q4 last year, and up 40.4 percent from the same period last year; net profits reached $649.4 million in Q1, up 17.3 percent QoQ or 37.4 percent YoY.

Tencent makes China’s biggest social export, WeChat. In today’s report, the company revealed that it now has nearly 195 million monthly active users on the social messaging app (194.4 million to be precise); that’s up 23.1 percent on the previous quarter, which is up 228.4 percent in a year. WeChat has over 300 million registered users, and is likely to exceed 400 million some time this month. As we noted last week, WeChat’s significant number of active users puts it close to surpassing Whatsapps’s 200 million actives, though about 90 percent of WeChat’s user-base is within mainland China, so it’s not that much of a global success yet.

Other social numbers:

• QQ instant messenger hit 825.4 million monthly active users, up 9.8 percent on Q1 2012. QQ’s peak simultaneous users reached 173.0 million, which was down 3.3 percent across the year.
• Qzone, the broader social network around QQ, got up to 611 million monthly actives, up 5.9 percent in a year.
• QQ Game Platform saw peak simultaneous users of 9.2 million, up 5.9 percent over the same period.

In other financial data, value-added services accounted for 78.7 percent of revenues in Q1 this year, reaching $1.72 billion. That’s up 13.6 percent from the last quarter. Online gaming revenues increased 19.3 percent over the same period to amount to $1.21 billion. That was mostly down to China-area gamers on things like Crossfire, and was boosted by increased gaming activity during Chinese New Year.

Founder, chairman, and CEO Pony Ma says in today’s report:

During the first quarter of 2013, we saw broad-based growth in user engagement and revenue across our key activities. This growth has enabled us to fund investments in longer-term opportunities such as WeChat international user acquisition, online video content aggregation, and e-commerce footprint expansion, while maintaining a healthy expansion rate in earnings and cash flow. We saw both strategic and financial benefits from our portfolio of investee companies, including a further special dividend from Mail.ru.

We will continue to invest proactively in innovation and technology, and to cultivate our open platform, in order to capture the mobile opportunities ahead and strengthen our position as the leading internet platform company in China.

WeChat hasn’t really been monetized so far, but Tencent will soon endow it with social gaming integration similar to what has been done by rival apps Line and KakaoTalk.

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

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

(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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We tested out a couple of the games and the results are, inevitably, quite basic. The idea is mainly being held back by the built-in WeChat web browser, which is more of an after-thought than a modern and fully-fledged browser. It prevents the games going full-screen, and some of the games will only work if you proceed to open them up in another browser like Safari or Chrome. But then none of this is being supported officially by Tencent, makers of the 300-million-user-strong app. Here’s how it works:

First I added DuoPao on WeChat, and then they gave me a list of games to play. I replied with the name of a game…

…Then the game starts inside WeChat’s rather basic web browser. No chance of going full-screen. Er… That’s it.

According to a post on Zhihu – a sort of Chinese Quora – by one of the DuoPao team, the studio so far has “received more than 5,000 users at zero cost” via this WeChat channel. About 1,500 are daily active users inside WeChat. Not bad for a free sideline to their usual distribution methods.

Despite all the issues with games in that basic browser, the startup team will persist with this – and with HTML5 games in general. As with many other shifts towards modern browser-based games – as we saw last year with GREE – a big part of the attraction is avoiding the revenue sharing program with Apple, Google, and Amazon in their app stores.

Social gaming has been huge for rival chat apps Line and KakaoTalk – though in native apps, not in a web browser. We’ll have to wait a while to see how Tencent, which is already China’s top grossing gaming company, can reshape its gaming expertise to fit into WeChat.

Vietnam’s VNG just reported that it hit a whopping VND 2 trillion ($90 million) in revenue for 2012. Yeah, that’s a lot. The company, which has its hands in everything online – social media, messaging apps, games, content distribution, mobile browsers – has long been Vietnam’s biggest startup success story.

The sales record is a 12 percent jump from last year and is certainly a symptom of their shotgun strategy coupled with a focus on entering international markets like Japan and China. It did not reveal how much of that revenue is profit.

With VNG’s new-found focus on mobile, the company is looking to keep up with the shifting tide in Vietnam as smartphones slowly takeover.

(Also read: Le Hong Minh and his VNG Story)

Arguably, today VNG is facing off on multiple fronts. In gaming, which is VNG’s core strength, smaller gaming studios are entering the space, especially for mobile games. This is a threat to VNG’s 60 percent market share of the Vietnamese gaming market. In social media, VNG’s social media baby, Zing, has seen a full frontal assault from Facebook, which has doubled its Vietnamese numbers in a year. In terms of legal issues, VNG’s struggled with Coca-Cola and Samsung pulling their advertising dollars and a newspaper content debacle. And the latest mobile messaging project, Zalo, is in a duel with a handful of foreign competitors such as Line and Whatsapp.

Despite all of this, the revenue numbers indicate that VNG is still on a growth path, which should give them the necessary dough to keep on fighting.

(Source: Pandora.vn)

Of course, if you want to learn more about GREE, a good place to start would be this long interview we did with GREE founder Yoshikazu Tanaka.

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

Continuing its strengthening mobile strategy, VNG released Giai Dieu Vui over the Lunar New Year break, a new iPhone game that gets users to compete with each other over their favorite types of music.

Giai Dieu Vui bears some striking similarities to Songpop. For those who don’t follow popular gaming apps, Songpop was one of the most recommended and played apps on Facebook. VNG’s looking to capture that same wave of social music gaming while also riding the wave with Zalo, the company’s popular messaging app.

The game allows users to connect with Facebook friends and challenge them on guessing five different songs in a row. The game employs the usual leaderboard and freemium models to keep users engaged and paying.

Why is this significant? It means VNG is slowly transitioning its massive gaming arm into mobile gaming. VNG, which built its empire with games, has moved into a number of online areas including social media, music distribution, video, and news over the past five years. But recently, the tech giant moved at least 80 of its people into the mobile messaging project, Zalo, and is clearly working on even more projects with Giai Dieu Vui being the most recent.

A VNG representative hinted to me that there are more mobile gaming apps of this nature coming within the year, so I’ll be keeping my eye out.

You can check out Giai Dieu Vui on iOS here and on Android here.

Startups always seem to grow up around games. Steve Jobs used to work at Atari and Bill Gates used to love playing poker. A bunch of entrepreneurs I’ve met in Ho Chi Minh city confess to playing games together before starting companies with each other. One of Vietnam’s biggest startup successes is VNG, formerly VinaGaming. These days, that space is accelerating in Vietnam with new, smaller companies rising to the game challenge. I’ll be looking at a handful of homegrown gaming companies in Vietnam during the next few weeks – starting with this one.

Colorbox started in 2009 with seven co-founders who use to work at Gameloft. They quit to start their own project focused specifically on mobile gaming.

Today, the company has 25 people, including two of the original co-founders. Since its inception, Colorbox has had over eight million downloads for all its games across Android, iOS, Samsung Bada, Symbian, and Windows Phone. Colorbox is now considering Blackberry as well.

Last February, Colorbox received VND 10 billion (US$500,000) in investment from Cyberagent Ventures, the Japanese venture capital firm.

New games

Cyberagent is known to only invest in companies that have proven themselves on the market. And I can see why they chose Colorbox. Colorbox’s two top apps are both premium titles. Dalton, a stick figure platformer, is their most downloaded app, which goes for $0.99. The second most downloaded app is Twins Candy, costing the same, which is a mahjong and Bejeweled inspired game.

With the success of the original Dalton, the team just released Dalton 2, and also Save The Sheep.

I asked Nguyen Hoang Nam, the co-founder and current CEO of Colorbox, what’s next:

Well, with Cyberagent’s capital, we can focus more on the Vietnamese market, which until recently, was not a big market. But it has made serious strides. In terms of our games, we’ll be focusing more seriously on multi-player games and social media integration.

Colorbox has already stepped up its social media integration with Save The Sheep, a game in which you toss a beach ball at sheep in cages under a time constraint. The game has Facebook integration that allows users to have weekly tournaments and leaderboards.

Despite a history of users in Vietnam not paying for mobile apps, as I wrote about earlier today, Nam is very optimistic about the Vietnamese market.

Before, the market was small and people wouldn’t pay. But mobile payment has gotten a little easier and people are learning that paying for software is easy and good. People can now pay through SMS even.

We believe Colorbox has a new game out soon aimed at its home market, so we’ll keep you posted.

If you’d like to check out the studio’s top games, you can download Dalton 2 on the iTunes App Store. You can get Twins Candy on iOS and also Save The Sheep on iOS.

But first, the data from the iOS App Store shows that, to quote AppAnnie:

One of the fastest growing major countries by downloads for the social networking category is China, where monthly downloads doubled from January 2012 to January 2013. In fact, now half of the category’s worldwide downloads come from the United States and China. Social Networking app revenue in China still remains very minimal, so we look forward to seeing whether publishers monetize these new downloads over the coming year.

Here’s the corresponding chart with China’s social app downloads highlighted in red:

WeChat, Whatsapp, and dating

WeChat is the sole Chinese representative on the global stage in this new monthly data. Made by Tencent (HKG:0700), it makes an appearance in sixth place:

The report notes that WeChat beats Whatsapp in terms of downloads in January, and is seeing good progress in some overseas markets as WeChat takes on rivals like Line and KakaoTalk in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. But, with no consumer-side monetization right now, WeChat makes no further appearances in other rankings. In contrast, Whatsapp, which is a 99 cents download, is second in terms of social app revenue, while Line is in pole position thanks to its paid sticker packs and social gaming platform.

As for the top 10 downloads for iOS just in China in January 2013, it’s dominated by apps for chatting and dating. A complete newcomer steals in as the top iOS download – the dating/chat app MicroLove. The smash-hit messaging app WeChat is in third place. In between is Papa, the Instagram clone that was huge last year in China thanks to one little gimmick – allowing people to post voice messages along with their photos. Tencent, which is China’s biggest web company, continues its reign with top ten spots for its IM-style apps QQ and QQ HD (8th and 9th); Sina Weibo is an interloper in seventh spot.

Star power: WeChat helps Tencent break into top global downloads ranking on iOS.

WeChat might be quiet on the monetization front right now, but then Tencent has already explained to us that it’s focusing on user acquisition and being a useful social tool.

Chinese developers lose out to Japan

Elsewhere in the report, there’s not much more from the world’s most populous nation. For a newly-risen tech giant, Chinese developers are still not really making it on the world stage. Tencent appears in ninth place among monthly downloads on iOS among global publishers, but that’s pretty much it. With so few China-made apps and games having gone global, and local smartphone users being very reluctant to pay up, the scene doesn’t look too encouraging compared to neighboring South Korea and Japan.

The Android black hole

Despite all the good work that AppAnnie does, its Android data is sadly useless in relation to China since not many Chinese consumers actually use Google Play for app downloads (and paid apps are not supported). Instead, China’s Android users turn to a variety of third-party app stores. That leaves us not knowing what Chinese Android fans – of which there are very many – are doing with their phones.

The sole Chinese publisher on the Google Play top downloads rankings is 3G.cn’s Go Launcher team, which makes an array of freeware tools and utilities. The ‘Go’ series of apps – including things like Go Weather – are popular around the world, which helped propel the developers into fifth place in terms of downloads (but not in terms of direct monetization).

It’s a timely reminder that, unlike with Korean and Japanese developers, China’s app creators cannot rely on profiting from their own populace, and have yet to muster a global blockbuster. That leaves Chinese developers struggling to monetize from other sources, like advertising or cross-promotion platforms in their home market, particularly on Android.

Line app has not just got people talking – it’s got them spending as well.

Regular readers will know that Japanese smartphone owners are great for spending money on apps. Now we have new data from AppAnnie, released this evening, that shows how the app monetization situation is developing in Japan and around the world. The report paints an interesting picture of amazing smartphone growth in Japan and Asia, along with some huge successes for Japanese social apps and games. Some world-beating achievements, in fact.

Cashing in on social

First up, AppAnnie notes that the social app category is third in terms of revenues around the world; social apps accounted for 30 percent more downloads in January 2013 compared to the previous year. Japanese app buyers are now spending nearly as much as those in the US on their iPhones and iPads:

Line app and the messaging explosion

The hit messaging app Line, made by NHN Japan, was the top social app for iOS revenue in Jansuary 2013, pipping Whatsapp to the post. With over 100 million registered users (just under half being in Japan), Line is the most downloaded social app in Japan – plus it’s the top grossing app Japan, Taiwan, and Thailand.

Line is also crowned the top non-game app in terms of monthly revenue on both iTunes and Google Play in January. It is the only Asian creation on the iOS apps list that’s dominated by American apps. Apple’s Pages app is second; Pandora Radio is third.

KakaoTalk comes out fighting against Line in the chat app battle, proving itself to be the third-best app for revenue on Android.

GungHo for gaming

As for gaming developers, Japan was once again on top. GungHo Online, with its 14 games, was the outright top publisher by revenue on iOS anywhere in the world. Its Puzzles and Dragons title was a particular hit, helping to push GungHo’s market cap to US$3.3 billion – higher than that of Zynga, or compatriot gaming rival GREE. As GungHo’s own financials point out, it made $92 million in gaming sales in January 2013 alone – a figure that’s already 30 percent of its 2012 revenue total. GungHo also sells PC games and console games, but the company recently pointed out that it’s now making more from iOS and Android.

Indeed, the report points out that Puzzles and Dragons was the top monetizing game on both iOS and Android across the globe.

Seventh on the top iOS publisher’s list is NHN (which is spread over Korea and Japan), boosted by the huge success from Line app and its social gaming platform. That’s shown with games like Line Birzzle, which rocketed to the top of iOS and Android store rankings across Asia. Let’s look at the scene on the iTunes App Store:

Asian Android domination

Even more Asian developers rocked the Android platform. GungHo was top publisher in Google Play too, with NHN popping up in second place. In fact, all but one of the leading ten publishers by revenue on Android are from Asia – it’s pretty amazing. It also shows why gaming is the best way to bring in the cash:

Other famliar names on the list include the rival social gaming platforms DeNA and GREE. Plus there’s a remarkable performance from Korea’s SundayToz team to make it into the top ten with only one game – that’s Anipang, which has been a huge hit especially on KakaoTalk’s own social gaming platform.

Anipang pops up as fourth in terms of gaming revenue on Android, just below the similar Line Pop title.

Game on for Asian developers

Ultimately, it’s a remarkable performance for Japanese and South Korean developers on both iOS and Android – breaking into social whilst also building up huge expertise in casual mobile gaming.

Japan recently passed the US to become the top country for Google Play revenue, so developers in the region can prosper among their regional audience – and break out across the globe. Well, in terms of monetizing power, if not necessarily worldwide market reach.

The Blackberry Z10 launch in Indonesia on Monday signals the launch of 4,000 apps made in the country. Yeah, that’s a very nice figure looking at the fact that Indonesia is also Blackberry’s biggest market in Asia. Kicking things off with one of those 4,000 is game developer Qajoo’s second game title, called Cak DuRae.

Cak DuRae tells the story of a chef who traced his lineage back to Indonesia and is looking to explore the culinary riches there, in particular by making awesome satays. The gameplay is quite simple as you only need to match three falling ingredients to Cak Durae’s satay sticks according to the customers’ order. There will also be dangerous falling objects like bombs for you to look out for.

The one thing that impressed me about this game is the graphic design. It looks very fun and more polished than most Indonesian-made games.

Another interesting thing is that the Cak DuRae character has Indonesian characteristics for being half-French and Madurese. The culinary dish of Madurese satay is quite famous here in Indonesia. The game also takes place in Indonesia.

Qajoo representative Nikko Soetjoadi said the reason they made the game first for Blackberry 10 is to test the market. The game is now waiting for approval for Android and iOS platforms. Qajoo’s first game title, Run Princess Run, was downloaded by over 100,000 players globally.

Cak DuRae is a premium game and will cost you $0.75 for the BB10 platform. Check out the game on Blackberry World here.

As with recent stats from Animoca for its native Hong Kong, the smartphone landscape in Singapore is dominated by Samsung. The top five Android phones observed in Singapore are all Samsung models, with the lead four all being big-screen models. It’s not a total whitewash, as Sony and HTC get a look-in as well. Here’s the top ten in full:

Good news for all app developers is that this mature market is keen on the latest software as well, with versions of Android 4.0 and 4.1 on 52.8 percent of all those phones. But there are still plenty of older – or budget – phones in use, with 16.5 percent of Singaporeans on Android 2.3.6. However, Hong Kongers are more on the cutting edge, where 58 percent are rocking Android 4.0+.

The exact selling price will be revealed at close of trading on March 5th, which is tomorrow. DeNA is currently at 2,596 yen per share at the close of Monday’s trading.

Sony’s announcement today, as caught by TheNextWeb, explains that it “is transforming its business portfolio and reorganizing its assets in an effort to strengthen its corporate structure. This sale is made as a part of that initiative.”

The Sony stake in DeNA, which amounts to 17,722,500 shares and 177,225 voting rights, will be bought by Nomura Securities.

Though $438 million is a useful chunk of cash for the struggling firm – which is now down to sales of under two million of each of its gaming gadgets in Japan – it’s not the biggest pile of money that Sony will be getting soon. That’s because Sony has also sold off one of its Tokyo office buildings for a cool $1.2 billion. Sony outlined a number of such cost-saving measures in its recent financial forecast.

Sony lost $5.7 billion in 2011. In 2012 Q1 it saw a less alarming $312 million evaporate, followed by $198 million vanishing into the ether in 2012 Q2.

DeNA, in contrast, is doing well as one of the world’s top social gaming platforms. It expanded aggressively in 2012 yet still managed $216 million in operating profit in 2012 Q3.

(Source: Sony (PDF))

We know that the China-made UC Browser has 400 million worldwide users, but we previously didn’t know exactly where they are. Now we do. Today at a conference, UCWeb CEO Yu Yongfu said that, as of December 2012, its mobile-oriented UC Browser has accumulated 100 million overseas users.

It’s another major milestone for UCWeb, which has been one of China’s most outward-looking tech companies for years. In its home market it’s up against Tencent’s QQ Browser and many others. Overseas it also has a wealth of rivals among third-party browsers, ranging from Opera to Dolphin to Skyfire.

UCWeb might be heading towards an overseas IPO this year, but no concrete plans or timelines have been laid out.

A UCWeb representative tells us that today’s UCWeb event was devoted to mobile gaming, where COO Zhu Shunyan laid out its China-oriented mobile gaming plans. Those center around its mobile content partner, UC9Game, which distributes mobile games and also runs the China-side UC Browser app store.

Earlier today we looked at statistics from game developer Animoca that show the Samsung Galaxy range of phones totally dominating in India. While that’s not quite the case in Hong Kong, the same research reveals that eight of the top 10 Android phones observed on Animoca’s games in Hong Kong were made by Samsung.

The only two interlopers were smartphones made by Sony, with the Xperia Arc S being the sixth most popular phone in this survey. But on the whole, Samsung’s big-screen phones are performing well in Hong Kong, led by the sizeable Samsung Galaxy Note 2 as the Android market leader. The newest Samsung Galaxy S3 hasn’t quite surpassed its predecessor, the S2 (see table below). As a whole, the Galaxy S series have racked up over 100 million in sales, and Hong Kong is clearly one of the developed markets where consumers want high-end new smartphones.

Hong Kongers’ desire to be on the cutting-edge is shown by the versions of Android OS that are being used. On Animoca’s gaming platform, the developers found that most Hong Kong mobile gamers – a full 21.2 percent – are on Android 4.1.1 (jelly bean) right now; a further 19.3 percent are on Android 4.0.4. The game developer says that these statistics show that companies making apps and mobile services need to look carefully at particular markets and not just think of averages across Asia; that’s because countries where consumers opt for older and cheaper phones (like India or the Philippines) can really skew the data and cause you to underestimate the demands of customers in more developed markets.

Here are the top 10 phones in Hong Kong in this study, which took place from January 15th to February 15th:

(Image: HongKongHustle)

We’ve all seen the big-screen Samsung Galaxy Note 2 or SIII phones being clutched in one uncomfortably stretched palm, but India’s Android market reveals that the smaller and cheaper Samsung Galaxy devices are actually more popular. Indeed, in new statistics released by game developer Animoca, they observed that every single one of India’s top 10 Android phones carry the Samsung Galaxy brand – and that the top one is a budget phone with a mere three-inch screen.

An Animoca representative explains to us that this this is from a sample base of 500,000 Indian gamers on the developer’s many titles, such as Pretty Pet Salon. It’s great news for Samsung (KRX:005930), whose budget Galaxy Y phone (pictured) is far and away the most popular Android phone in India.

Of course, this doesn’t equate with sales in India, but statistics from these kinds of mobile platforms often give a good picture of what folks are using. I asked Animoca’s Matt McAllister if these stats (see the full top 10 below) might be skewed towards younger gamers, and he responded:

Yes, the demographic is mobile gamers, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a younger demographic. Animoca publishes over 300 games that attract many different audiences, so I’d say it’s fairly representative of the overall populations at large.

There are plenty of other budget Android phones in India, such as the fairly powerful Micromax A85, so Samsung might soon find its dominance weakened by telcos shipping cheap phones from such Chinese OEMs.

The game startup says that the most popular Android OS version in India is Android 2.3.6 (gingerbread) with 39.1 percent market share, which proves that cheaper phones – which often come with outdated software – rule the roost. But, more promisingly, Android 4.0.4 (ice-cream sandwich) is next up, with 17.9 percent share.

Here’s the phone list:

Stay tuned for stats later today from Animoca for their native Hong Kong as well.

Nexon’s (TYO:3659) Q4 2012 results are just in. In brief, the Korean gaming giant did okay. Last quarter saw Nexon hitting ¥30.94 billion (US$329.29 million) in consolidated revenue which was up 24 percent compared to the same quarter last year. Operating income increased by 25 percent from the same quarter last year to ¥9.8 billion ($104.1 million) .

[UPDATE: An editorial slip-up turned the above two yen numbers into millions when they should be billions. It's all now corrected. Apologies].

Operating income margin was at 31.6 percent as more mobile gaming gave Nexon higher margins. In October last year Nexon acquired Japanese mobile game developer Gloops for a whopping $469 million. It also acquired inBlue for an undisclosed amount.

There’s a net loss of $1 million as Nexon pointed to write-downs of some of its investments and also higher tax expenses due to new Korean tax regulations.

For Nexon’s fiscal year 2012, here are the highlights from its statement:

Nexon revenues by region from its latest financials.

• Total revenues were $1.2 billion for full-year 2012, an increase of 24 percent over the prior fiscal year.

• Operating income was $513 million, an increase of 25 percent over the previous year. Operating income margin was 44.1 percent, slightly higher than the 43.7 percent in 2011.

• Adjusted net income for the year was $297 million, up two percent over last year.

It’s apparent that Nexon is looking to march towards mobile gaming with its Gloops and inBlue acquisition. It has also recently partnered up with DeNA which will see more Nexon games over at the Mobage platform for both Japanese and global users. Nexon forecasted that for Q1 2013, revenue from mobile gaming is expected to increase from $2.39 million to $80 million, a whopping 33 times higher. Seungwoo Choi, President and CEO of Nexon said:

We enhanced our mobile business through the successful acquisitions of inBlue and Gloops, positioning Nexon as the leading third-party mobile game developer globally. Since acquiring these companies, both have outperformed our expectations and each is set to deliver a strong 2013 lineup for the domestic and international markets.

Importantly, through our recent alliance, DeNA is running strong marketing promotions for our games on the Mobage platform. We expect continued strength in our PC business over 2013 as we begin to realize the returns from the large publishing deals we signed in 2012.

For now, Nexon’s businesses are very much focused on China, Korea, and Japan. North America and Europe play a small role in its revenue. Al, there’s no sign of Southeast Asia operations anytime soon.

Korean-made messaging app KakaoTalk launched its Game Platform on Android in its home country last July – and today that social gaming system is rolling out on iOS and coming to Japan as well. It’s a major challenge to chief rival Line app, made by NHN Japan, as well as to other social gaming platforms from that country, such as GREE and DeNA’s Mobage.

For KakaoTalk users, it means that they now have six iOS apps by third-party developers that are tied to KakaoTalk’s social gaming network. As pointed out by Serkan Toto today, those titles are: Tap Tap Blitz, Puzzle Zoo Zoo, Sushi Panic (pictured above), Zoo Zoo Bubble, and Pocket Colony.

Mobile gamers in Japan will also have access to the KakaoTalk Game Platform in a bunch of supported Android games. Those include SundayToz’ Anipang, which was the first success story on the KakaoTalk platform as the messaging app’s users proved to be keen gamers who downloaded Anipang over two million times in a couple of weeks. That soon made it the second highest grossing game on Google Play in South Korea.

KakaoTalk is hoping to have 100 games on board by the end of the year.

Global ambitions

This push into Japan is supported by Yahoo Japan, which owns 50 percent of Kakao Japan, the messaging app’s subsidiary in that country.

In the huge battle for mobile messaging users, KakaoTalk has over 70 million users, up against Line’s crowd of 100 million. Line also incorporates social gaming, and has likewise spurred on some games to great popular success. It’s not quite so balanced in Japan, however. Serkan cites The Nikkei as saying that KakaoTalk has seven million users in Japan, while NHN’s Line has 41 million of its total user-base within Japan.

Interestingly, the Kakao company was founded by Beom-Soo Kim, the former CEO of Korea-based NHN Corporation, which later went on to spawn Line app from the NHN Japan subsidiary.

Both Line and KakaoTalk have global ambitions, with the two rivals looking to young and mobile-oriented Southeast Asian users at first. Countries like Taiwan and Indonesia have proved to be particularly strong battle grounds for the apps – though neither provide social gaming in those nations.

(Source: Serkan Toto)

Gamers might be aware that GungHo Online is one of Japan’s top mobile game publishers – and now GungHo is a bit bigger after acquiring the quirky Grasshopper Manufacture studio. The financial details haven’t been revealed.

Grasshopper is headed by the iconic Goichi Suda – aka Suda51 – who will, along with the whole team of 140 employees, join GungHo whilst also retaining the ‘Grasshopper’ branding. The studio has made titles like Lollipop Chainsaw for Xbox and PS3 and the Wii series of No More Heroes games.

Yesterday’s announcement from GungHo points out that this new acquisition “becomes the fourth prominent studio to become part of [GungHo]’s fold, joining Ragnarok developer Gravity, Lunar and Grandia creator Game Arts, and Tenchu developer Acquire.”

GungHo CEO and president Kazuki Morishita detailed the reason for the major purchase:

We believe the strength of a publisher lies in its creative talent so with the addition of Grasshopper Manufacture and Suda51 we are adding some of the most innovative talent in today’s gaming world to our stellar family of independently-operated studios.

As for GungHo’s creations, its newest hit is the iOS game Puzzles and Dragons that has launched in the US and lots of other markets to hit over seven million downloads so far. Its newer Princess Punt Sweets is only out in Japan so far, but the bizarre game has had over a million downloads in its first week of availability in its home country.

(Source: Kotaku)

Last week I mentioned a fun new Japanese mobile game called Princess Punt Sweets, from developer Gung Ho Entertainment. Admittedly, it’s a pretty weird game as your character, the princess, is tasked with kicking heroes into battle against the enemy.

According to the folks over at gamebiz.jp, the title – which so far has only launched for the Japanese market – has already reached a million downloads as of January 13th. That’s just 56 days since it was launched, which is certainly strong performance for just the Japanese market. The game was the top free iOS app in Japan a week ago, although currently it has slid to the 20th position.

But Princess Punt Sweets still ranks high on the top grossing app charts, sitting in sixth. One game that ranks ahead of it is the wildly popular Puzzles and Dragons, which is of course Gung Ho’s most successful game to date. That title has practically ruled the top grossing charts in Japan since its initial release back in February of 2012.

The previous Princess Punts game eventually got an English version, so I expect that with any luck this new title will as well. But if you’d like to try the older version, you can get it over on Apple’s app store.

Hot on the heels of last week’s rebranding announcement, Japan’s DeNA (TYO:2432) has announced a major partnership today with game developer and publisher Nexon (TYO:3659). The tie-up will see new Nexon games coming over DeNA’s Mobage platform for both Japanese and global users. DeNA will also provide marketing and user acquisition support for Nexon titles.

DeNA already had a partnership in place with Japanese game developer Gloops, which was subsequently acquired by Nexon last October for the whopping sum of $36.5 billion yen ¹.

According to the announcement, Nexon and Gloops are planning many new English titles for Mobage this year, as well as 10 titles for Mobage Japan. Nexon’s president and CEO noted that the agreement helps in “extending Nexon’s mobile strategy” and “growing its presence in the expanding global mobile market.”

DeNA’s biggest hit on the Mobage platform in 2012 was Rage of Bahamut by far, a title developed by Cygames. Back in December we saw that title surpass the lofty milestone of 10 million users.

There’s a wacky creativity behind some Japanese-made games that I really enjoy. It’s the same humorous spirit that went into Ponus’s Battle Cats, and I suppose its probably the same sort of notion that led earlier pioneers to create strange characters like Mario Bros and Kirby.

I couldn’t help but think about those games as I tried to rationalize what must have been going through the minds of the folks at Gung Ho Entertainment (JASDAQ:3765) when they came up with Princess Punt, an unusual game where you play a princess who sends her heroes into battle with a good swift kick. Gung Ho’s recent follow-up, Princess Punt Sweets, is my first introduction to the strange mobile game. So far since its release earlier this week, Princess Punt Sweets has been doing well on the charts in Japan, becoming the top free iOS app on Monday, where it currently still sits. The title is in Japanese only, but you can play the previous Princess Punt in English if you’d like.

While I like the creative character concept, the game clearly borrows very liberally from Rovio’s Angry Birds. The princess’s kick is pretty much the same mechanic as Rovio’s slingshot, and some of the enemy structures can look pretty similar at times as well. In addition, the three star rating for level completion is very much like Angry Birds. But I guess half the mobile game devs in the world are using this by now.

Where Princess Punt Sweet has made an improvement, however, is by putting enemies together in sequence in a round. So when you have finished punting your way past the first group of bad guys, you simple run past whatever is left of them to face the next enemies in that particular level. There are also gacha elements in the game, as well as the ability to level up your heroes as you progress through levels. I should note that I experienced a few error alerts when playing, so at this early stage it looks like there are still some bugs to work through.

As you may know, Gung Ho is best known for its hit game Puzzles and Dragons. I have yet to get really hooked on that title, but it’s available on the US App Store if you’d like to give it a try. If Princess Punt Sweets can manage even a fraction of the popularity of Puzzles and Dragons, then I’m sure everyone at Gung Ho will be delighted.

Yesterday Indonesian game developer Touchten officially launched its first new game title of the year, called Cute Kill. Although there is no shortage of zombie apocalypse-themed games out there, this particular game is unique on its own as it lets you kill those horrible zombies with a cute baby character being piggybacked by his sister.

Cute Kill is a shooting game where users get to play both the main characters, Sis and Baby, who are running away from the zombies and shooting at them at the same time. As the level progresses, there will be obstacles and traps in front of Sis to make the game more challenging. In the process, users can to upgrade their weapons and use other power-ups as well.

The game’s project manager, Frederick Tirta, was inspired by the movie Zombieland where people were shooting at zombies behind them. Then an idea popped up where a baby would be carried on someone’s back, and shoot enemies that are sneaking up from behind. Interestingly, the team almost shelved this game due to a hiatus during the game development. Now that it’s ready, Anton Soeharyo, the CEO of Touchten Games, is excited about the new game:

This must be the cutest title we have so far, and our team worked hard to implement and polish it to produce high quality gameplay. We can’t wait for gamers to enjoy Cute Kill!

The Cute Kill game is available now on iOS and is scheduled to be released on Android by the end of this month. The team is working with several entities to promote this game, including an attempt to get it featured on Google Play. Touchten will keep on updating the game and will welcome feedback, especially comments posted on the TouchArcade forum.

On a related note, Touchten told us that localized versions of Sky Beauty from its flagship game Infinite Sky, have hit a delay on its release for the Chinese and Japanese markets. Anton says that the Chinese version of the game should be available in the Chinese Apple App Store by the end of this month, while its Android version should be available in China’s various Android app stores by the end of February. There’s no date specified yet for the Japanese release.

iOS users can download Cute Kill for iOS here for $0.99.

Yesterday, Indonesian telco XL Axiata (EXCL:IJ) and gaming platform Kotagames launched a program called the XL Developer Network. The program is meant to help grow the local game developer ecosystem, and to achieve that XL Axiata will encourage local devs to build web-based games for the Kotagames platform.

XL Axiata promises to splash IDR 200 million (about $20,000) to promote Kotagames.com and the games inside it. The company will also hold workshops aimed at training people to build games on the platform which will take place in big cities like Jakarta, Depok, Bandung, Yogyakarta, and Surabaya this year. Furthermore, there will be a game developer competition held in March which promises prizes in the form of gadgets for the winners.

Game developers can earn money from the in-app purchase feature available on Kotagames for XL Axiata and Telkomsel users. The money-sharing scheme can earn developers up to 70 percent of the revenue on their web-based games depending on the agreement. The games published on Kotagames will be targeting users in India and Southeast Asia.

Kompas cites Kotagames founder and CEO Alvin Yap as saying that there are around two million Kotagames users at the moment, with 1.2 million of them being XL Axiata customers. Alvin hopes that this latest cooperation can help achieve Kotagames’ target of 20 million users in the next one or two years.

No Flash

Kotagames director Felix Ramli said that any web-based games developed for Kotagames during this program should be playable on both the full website and on mobile devices. This rules out Flash-based games which might not work on lots of mobiles.

He explained that the feature phone games on Kotagames usually use HTML or PHP programming languages, while the upcoming smartphone games will use HTML5. You might want to check Felix’s recipe for building great games for feature phones, and Alvin’s discussion on how feasible it is to monetize from feature phone games. At the moment, the most popular game available on Kotagames is Nijibox’s Monster Fantasia.

Making gaming more social

It should be noted that Kotagames has changed its social gaming interface recently. Now it looks a lot neater with more pictures and features. There are four main pages on the website – Home, Games, Alerts, and More. Inside the More section, users can update their status, buy virtual items for their avatar, chat with friends, and other activities. The biggest change might be its Facebook login feature, which wasn’t available before the interface revamp.

In the meantime, XL Axiata is now looking to reach more local developers as it is in talks with both Google and Apple to provide carrier billing for both Android and iOS apps in the country. The telecom has already set up carrier billing for Blackberry and Windows Phone. All in all, it is great to see one of Indonesia’s mobile telcos support the potential in the gaming and apps industry in the country.

(Source: Kompas #1, #2, and tribunnews)

Mobile social gaming giant GREE (TYO:3632) has issued an announcement in Japanese today apologizing that some minors were charged beyond the spending limits that the company put in place last April.

Between April 26 and September 7, GREE says that some 733 minors were affected by a system failure on feature phones which allowed them to spend more than the imposed restrictive spending limit (5,000 yen per month for under 15 years old; 10,000 yen per month for ages 16 to 19 ¹). The error affected some minors on feature phones, who used credit cards as their payment option.

GREE became aware of this error on September 6, and is refunding those over-charges, amounting to over 28 million yen (or about $322,000) in total.

It’s certainly not a good note to start the year on, but of course given the controversial Kompu Gacha issue that plagued GREE and other social gaming companies in 2012, it is wise for the company to publicly acknowledge and atone for the error in this manner.

GREE first introduced restrictive payments for minors back in April of last year (as Serkan Toto pointed out at the time), and so it appears that this failure/error occurred soon after that system went into place. GREE’s rival DeNA also implemented the same sort of cap just a few weeks afterwards. (Via NHK, including television report)

Japan’s DeNA (TYO:2432) announced today that it will be teaming up with KT Corporation (NYSE:KT) in Korea to ‘mutually exchange mobile social games’ between the companies’ respective networks.

This means that KT will offer selected games from Daum Mobage, which is DeNA’s platform in Korea which it operates with the popular Daum web portal. It will also help out with billing integration for in-game purchases of Daum Mobage virtual currency through its Olleh Market.

Likewise, DeNA will offer selected KT titles on its Mobage platform in Japan, lending marketing and consultation support as well. The cross border partnership will likely serve both companies well.

Back in 2011, when the Daum Mobage partnership was initially signed, the partners set the goal of reaching 10 million user subscriptions by the end of 2012. I suspect they are falling short, since today’s announcement didn’t mention anything about that – but I’ve inquired with DeNA to confirm this point.

DeNA reported in its Q2 financials that Daum Mobage is providing over 30 titles, and that includes its hit game Rage of Bahamut which surpassed the one million user milestone in Korea earlier this month.

Sega’s sequel to Kingdom Quest was recently released, and it briefly found itself at the top of the free iOS app charts in Japan yesterday [1]. I had not played the original, which boasts 3.5 million downloads worldwide, so I took Kingdom Conquest II for a quick spin this evening.

So far I’m enjoying the game a lot, although I’m finding it hard to label it as fitting within any single game genre. It has elements of city building, card battle, and live action 3D RPG. Players take on the role of a conquerer and are tasked with developing cities, assembling units of monsters which you use to attack other monsters, and acquire new territories.

The game tutorial is rather long and linear, and I suspect I would enjoy it more were there more 3D action scenes interspersed. The battle scenes are loads of fun, and its one of the few games I’ve seen which has a virtual d-pad that doesn’t suck. The city building element is an interesting one, and I like social aspects of the game where you can cooperate with other players in the action modes. The small buttons can be less than responsive at times though, and I wish they were a little more forgiving.

While it is a lot of fun, I don’t expect Kingdom Conquest II to chart very high globally. But I did find it interesting to see that in addition to this title, Sega’s Hatsune Miku Live Stage Producer was doing well also. Currently sits just ahead of Kingdom Conquest II in second spot overall. Not a bad day for the folks at Sega!

If you’d like to give KCII a try, you can download it for iOS or Android. Screenshots can be found below.

3d battle view

city building view

map view, one level out from city view

A timeline of Japan’s social/mobile space (click to enlarge)

Thanks to Alexei Polyakov over at Analytica1st.com for pointing out this great presentation from the folks at GMO Internet (TYO:9449) [1] about the Japanese gaming market, including a pretty extensive history, as well as forecasts as to where things are headed.

If you’re at all interested in the mobile and social gaming space, I recommend you give this whole presentation a look. When it comes to mobile in particular, trends that happen in Japan are often a bellwether indicator of where the entire industry is going once the global market matures.

The folks at App Annie recently claimed that Japan has become the top country for Google Play revenues, and GMO’s report points out that the nation is the fastest growing country (560 percent) in terms of revenue on Apple’s app store (citing Distimo, June). So it’s certainly a market that you want a piece of if you’re a mobile app or game developer.

You can check out the slideshare presentation in its entirety below. And stay tuned to this blog in December for our own year end round-up of Japan’s mobile gaming space.

The folks over at AllThingsD report today that Disney (NYSE:DIS) will be acquiring Studio Ex, a game developer based out of South Korea, in order to make a push into the Asian market. Terms of the reported deal were not disclosed, but AllThingsD cites Disney’s statement regarding the matter:

The Walt Disney Company has acquired Studio Ex, a games development studio in Korea that focuses on multiplayer, free-to-play online and mobile games. […] Through a stock purchase agreement, Studio Ex is now a wholly owned subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company reporting into Disney Interactive.

While the afore-mentioned report didn’t mention it, this appears to be the same StudioEx whose US subsidiary raised $1.9 million back in 2010. Its Facebook game Galaxy X (aka Pluto Attacks) has a big following, and looks pretty impressive after I gave it a quick test run.

The studio will be working on games for Asia based on Disney intellectual property for Asian markets. (I wonder if this includes the Star Wars franchise too?)

Disney has been active in the Asia region, with its China branch partnering with China Mobile Games and Entertainment on Temple Run: Brave and Where’s My Water, and we also saw the company tie up with Japanese social gaming giant DeNA on Marvel’s War of Heroes.

[Image: dapsmagic.com]

Indonesian game developer Touchten’s flagship game, Infinite Sky, which has garnered more than one million downloads and 200,000 daily active users, has managed to break even on revenues from the game in November. Rokimas Soeharyo, the co-founder of Touchten, then told us that the studio is going to localize the game for the Chinese and Japanese market, and the updated iOS version should be available this week for both markets. But we’ll need to wait around two to three more months for the Android version in those languages to arrive.

Roki explained that the localization efforts for the Chinese version of Infinite Sky will go beyond language translations and a local ad network. The game will have social integration with Weibo and QQ rather than Facebook and Twitter. Then they are also open to possibility of localizing the game’s story as well to make it more relatable to the Chinese market in the future. He said that the Japanese version would only receive language translations and not support for homegrown social networks like Mixi.

Roki noted that they are partnering with Chinese game publisher Yodo1 for the Chinese launch. He mentioned several benefits that they’ll get from this partnership, which includes Infinite Sky being featured in several third-party app stores, and intellectual property protection. The team is also working on the sequel of Infinite Sky at the moment, and the game should be available in mid 2013.

Besides China and Japan, Touchten is looking to make its presence felt in South America as well. The game developers are now working on a football game for the upcoming 2014 World Cup in Brazil. He told me that they are working with a legendary Brazilian footballer for this game. Roki notes:

The Brazil mobile market is a huge and growing market, and we would like to seize the opportunity sooner rather than later. There are over 19 million smartphones in Brazil. This football game presents a great opportunity to tap into those users.

Look out for the upcoming update to Infinite Sky in iTunes.

Yesterday Japanese mobile gaming giant GREE (TYO:3632) announced a partnership with Brazilian game developer Vostu, the leading social games company in Latin America. And now just a day later, GREE has announced another tie-up in the region, which will bring Vampire Season – Monster Defense to its GREE platform.

The title is developed by Brainz, which is part of Columbia-based ZIO, one of the top 3D animation and media studios on the continent.

According to the announcement, the company worked closely with GREE recently to improve the game, rebuild levels, and introduce currencies in the game. Vampire Season – Monster Defense is a tower defense game where players assume the responsibility of protecting Count Dracula from an onslaught of bad good guys. The 3D graphics look pretty sharp, and I’m looking forward to checking this one out.

The game is available for iOS currently, and it will be coming over to the GREE platform in the next few weeks, along with an Android version as well. For a preview of how it looks, check out the trailer below.

For GREE, this partnership marks the second step in its explorations in Latin America, after it established a subsidiary in São Paulo, Brazil earlier in the year to facilitate such activity.

We recently wrote about Mr. Ninja, a fun iPhone game from Japanese developer Ponos. That game was fun for casual play, and for the first time really put Ponus on our radar as a developer to watch. And over the past couple of days I’ve taken a closer look at some of their games, most notably Battle Cats, which was released for iPhone and iPad just over a week ago.

The title is a tower defense game, which might initially turn you off with its bad English text and weird backstory intro. But if you can get past that minor flaw, you’ll be rewarded. You take your cat army into battle against the enemy, defending your own tower and trying to destroy theirs. You have different cats with different abilities that you can send into battle, as well as a canon mounted on your castle which you can fire at enemies when it is recharged.

Overall, I really like the game mechanics of Battle Cats. I’m a big fan of tower defense games in general, but this one sort of reminds me of Age of Empires – or dare I say chess – in how you can put stronger defensive cats up front and try to follow up with more offensive cats from the back. Tempo also comes into play as you can time your attacks to coincide with lapses in the enemies attacking wave.

Each round of the game takes place in a different region of Japan, so if you can’t beat one round, you can back track and re-do an earlier round to earn XP and upgrade your army. Alternatively, you can pay to continue or buy more energy so you don’t have to wait to play more rounds. The in-app purchases are smartly implemented, and so far they haven’t crippled the game for me in any way [1].

Battle Cats is currently doing well in the ‘strategy’ and ‘simulation’ categories in the Japanese app store, but it hasn’t really made an impact anywhere else yet. I know it’s still early in the lifespan of this game, but I think that with some polishing, this game could have some serious potential to be a global hit. It’s the most fun I’ve had on an iPad since Infinity Blade. Battle Cats fits right in that category of ‘cute/wacky Japan’ that follows in the bizarre tradition of Nyan Cat, and the characters are just as marketable as those in Angry Birds [2].

Give it a try and let me know what you think. You can download it for free over in the App Store. Selfish update: If you want to kickstart your game with an invite code, mine is yg2t0!

invoking the god cat, similar to Angry Birds’ Mighty Eagle

Japan’s Kiteretsu has released the Android version of its Zookeeper Battle app worldwide, after its iOS app has racked up more than a million downloads since its release back in August.

The game combines puzzle and battle elements (sort of in the same way that Puzzles & Dragons does), as the points you score in the brief puzzle session are then carried into battle against your real-time opponent.

I took the game for a spin to check out what the fuss was about, and I confess it was a lot of fun. The graphics are simple, but the gameplay is easy and fun. You can obtain special items in the puzzle as well, like hearts to give your life meter a boost, or even a sand-bucket to grey out your opponents puzzle, thus making it harder for them to gain points.

So far the iOS game, which appears to have done particularly well in Greater China, is available in English, Japanese, Korean, and Simplified Chinese, as is the newly launched Android version. Annoyingly, there are some weird misspellings and grammar oddities in the English version, and I’m really not sure how companies can push titles to global audiences without ensuring the text in their game is taken care of [1].

Overall I think it’s a fun game, and I recommend you give it a try and let us know what you think. You can get the new Android version from the Google Play app store now.

The big news today from GREE, the Japan-based social gaming platform, is that it’s now accepting mobile games built in HTML5. The now-HTML5-compatible social gaming platform will roll out in beta starting this month.

Of course, GREE still publishes and hosts games made for iOS and Android. But having mobile browser-based games ensures compatibility across all types of smartphones. All you need is a HTML5 compatible mobile browser to play. On top of that, GREE has also increased its language support from just Japanese and English to include 14 other languages. Plus, the company notes that it “also plans to launch its own in-house social games as web apps.” As for payments, the gaming platform is adding support for Paypal alongside the usual array of credit cards; there’ll also be a total of 166 mobile carriers supporting gaming payments via telco billing.

HTML5 gaming was a major aspect of the serious deal earlier today between GREE and SingTel.

The other part of the story is simple percentages. GREE wishes to escape paying 30 percent of its app revenue to Apple and Google (both companies take around 30 percent of the income generated by app sales in their stores). It’s a logical route to take – delivering games straight into consumers’ hands – and I’m excited to see how it pans out.

GREE isn’t unfamiliar with mobile browser games. In Japan, many games are still played on mobile browsers. But HTML5 gives developers more room to breathe. Noritaka Kobayashi, VP of the Business Development Department at GREE Singapore, tells me:

We have talked to our third-party partners. Most of them are very interested in building HTML5 games. The competition in app stores is too tough and it’s hard to maintain the ranking. So once HTML5 works, [developers] might shift easily.

So far there is only one title in HTML5 — Cerberus Age — for this open beta launch. But more proven titles on the app stores will soon be converted to HTML5 soon.

Today, mobile gaming giant GREE announced that it has exclusively partnered up with SingTel to promote its mobile games in Singapore. Besides promoting games, the partnership will allow subscribers to pay for games or virtual items through SingTel direct carrier billing. This partnership, for now, is limited to the Singapore market.

Many folks (myself included) might be surprised and wondering why GREE is focusing so much on Singapore, which just has 5 million inhabitants. Noritaka Kobayashi, VP, Business Development Department of GREE Singapore office, explains that Singapore has a high smartphone penetration rate. According to IDA’s statistics for Q1 2012, there are more than 5.9 million 3G users in Singapore.

Contrary to what Singaporeans might think, Kobayashi explains that Singaporean gamers are actually willing to pay for mobile games and in-app items. He tells me:

Compared to the U.S., Singapore’s average revenue per user (ARPU) is very close. It depends on the games and weeks. Sometimes, Singapore [could be] higher than the US or even Japan.

I was also pointed to the game Cerberus Age, which generates ridiculous amounts of ARPU in Singapore. In terms of growth forecast, GREE hopes to grow 500 percent a year in revenue from today onwards across APAC, excluding Japan, China, and Korea.

Besides Singapore, GREE is also targeting strong partnerships in five particular markets: Singapore, Australia, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, and India. So if the SingTel partnership works well in Singapore, there’s a good chance that the Japanese company will extend this SingTel partnership to Philippines, Australia, India, and Indonesia. Yes, SingTel has subsidiaries in each market.

[UPDATED moments later: Our story on GREE's other big news today, its push into HTML5 mobile gaming, is now online. Clearly it's linked to this SingTel deal, so as to side-step Apple and Google, who each take about 30 percent of app revenue via their app stores].

This SingTel tie-up is set up to promote just HTML5 games. So I expressed the assumption to GREE’s APAC head that SingTel is likely taking less than 30 percent revenue share from this partnership. But Kobayashi didn’t deny or confirm if my assumption was right.

Cheong Hai Thoo, Head of Multimedia, Group Digital L!fe, SingTel said in the statement:

We are delighted to be the first to offer web-based GREE games with direct billing to our customers on their smartphones. There has been a huge increase in the number of people playing games on their phones and the convenience of paying and receiving one bill while playing GREE’s great range of games is a definite selling point.

China Mobile Games and Entertainment Group (NASDAQ:CMGE) has announced today that the company has signed an agreement with Walt Disney’s (NYSE:DIS) China branch. The partnership will see CMGE bringing two of Disney’s mobile games, Temple Run: Brave and Where’s My Water?, onto Chinese handsets. The revenue generated from the two games will be shared by both companies.

The two hit games will be pre-installed on various Android smartphones and made available through a number of websites. Where’s My Water? will also be pre-installed on feature phones and CMGE’s feature phone gaming platform Aiwan. This will happen as early as this month.

Looking at its iOS versions of these two games on AppAnnie.com [1], Temple Run: Brave is very popular in China, ranking 10th in the games category, while Where’s My Water? is positioned fifth in the country.

Coincidentally, it was in March of this year that Apple’s 25 billionth app was downloaded, and the lucky girl who downloaded the app won a $10,000 iTunes gift card as a result. The app? Where’s My Water?. And the girl was from Qingdao, China.

DeNA (TYO:2432) points out today that its mobile RPG Blood Brothers reached the top of the Google Play top grossing app charts in the US over the weekend. The fantasy RPG has been doing well for the past few months, gradually climbing up in the top ten until it briefly took the top spot this past Saturday (see chart below).

Interestingly, the app that Blood Brothers knocked out of the first spot (temporarily) was another Mobage title, Rage of Bahamut. That game held that position for almost six months. DeNA’s executive games director Kenji Kobayashi is pleased with the success of this up-and-coming title:

Following the success of Rage of Bahamut, we are delighted to see Blood Brothers also gaining remarkable popularity in the U.S. and other countries. […] In Japan, DeNA has accumulated extensive know-how on rapidly iterative game design, where we constantly and quickly incorporate user feedback to our games. We see Blood Brothers’ success as another solid proof point that the model works across borders, not just in Japan.

source: app annie

And indeed, Blood Brothers has been very popular in a number of regions, becoming the top grossing app in more than 22 countries, including France and Canada, plus India, Indonesia, Thailand, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, and the Philippines here in Asia.

How’s Blood Brothers doing on iOS? That version of the game launched back in August, and ranks as a top ten top grossing app for the ‘role playing’ and ‘adventure’ categories. The app claims over 150,000 downloads to date.

Check out the trailer for Blood Brothers below.

I love listening to stories of successful entrepreneurs. Like with a movie superhero, they are always wracked by pain and struggles, battling oppression by stronger forces. But the hero always emerges as the victor by sheer resilience and courage. I recently met up with a Singaporean entrepreneur, and his journey is very much that kind of story. Plus, his startup has all the ingredients to become very successful in the near future.

Don Sim started working after graduation in 2010 as a UX and usability specialist at iTwin. In his six-month stint, he felt that many of his recommendations were not taken up and he felt he could do a lot more by being an independent consultant. As such, he started his first startup, 1618 Interactive Solutions, with his two buddies Alwyn Lee and Yappy Yap while still working at iTwin. That venture did not work out well and he sold it off. At 26 years old, with no solid achievements – compared to fellow peers who had already started climbing the corporate ladder – some would have considered another career path. He pushed on.

Don, with his two buddies, started Daylight Studios (the “day” part stands for Don-Alwyn-Yappy) in May 2011 and chose to focus on mobile social games, believing that they can do a lot better than many other games developers in the market.

Gutsy decision #1: No working capital

Knowing that they need a six-figure sum of working capital to operate, many entrepreneurs would have gone for funding from investors, government, or family and friends before starting; but the Daylight Studios team chose a different path.

The trio chose to grind out the working capital by taking up outsourcing projects from other businesses. Thanks to their contacts at earlier businesses, they took up highly lucrative projects from EZ Link, American Express, and the telco, M1. They worked out in a small office space (with just a temporary bed and a few working desks), drew low “bread and butter” pay, and worked long hours. For six months, they stuck to their plan and grinded out their working capital.

Gutsy decision #2: Rejecting EA

The Daylight Studios crew published their first game, Reign of Heroes, on social gaming platform Mig33 on December 2011, and the game was very well received. Soon after, EA Games knocked on the studio’s doors to co-develop a feature phone version of Command and Conquer for Southeast Asia. Most struggling startups at that point would have jumped at the prospect of working with big EA. However, Don felt that the deal was lopsided in favour of EA and the contact person, they felt, was too arrogant to listen to negotiating points from a startup. So Don and the team rejected the offer. This is a decision they never regretted.

Soon after, other gaming giants like Konami contacted Daylight Studios, and the startup co-developed the recently open beta launched Hisho Collection game on the Kotagames platform. The game was limited to 10,000 downloads, and the beta was fully downloaded in just four days despite minimal marketing.

Gutsy decision #3: Sticking to your beliefs

Don has a belief that seems to be deeply imbued in him and his team; he mentioned it more than three times during our meeting. He explains:

Since day one, Daylight Studios has always had only one goal in mind: to build the best possible games which emphasize creative innovation. This is so when we look back, 10 to 20 years from now, we will be proud of every single game title that we have created.

This may be the reason why the games that Daylight Studios have produced are of such good quality and popular in many countries. In total, the titles have over one million registered users to date. The team also takes the effort to culturalize their games so people in each country can identify with the gameplay – as many other good developers do.

In the near future, look out for the startup’s latest in-development multiplayer social RPG, Conquest Age, a smartphone-based game that will be launched soon. Don showed me a sneak preview and the graphics and gameplay impressed me a lot.

Daylight Studios is seed funded by angel investors Timothy Grant and Krishna Ramachandra in early 2012. The studio is in the midst of raising its next financing round to expand its team and produce some more disruptive games. The team is made up of 15 people of different nationalities – and one gutsy founder(all pictured below), Don Sim, whom I think deserves success if he continues to work this hard.

Don Sim (right with black blazer) and his team

Image credit

Korean game development studio Playnery has been growing quickly since it opened in October of last year. Already partnered up with Zynga to distribute its forthcoming first title Mother of Myth, now Playnery has secured $3.7 million in funding, led by Japan’s Softbank Ventures. Qualcomm and Stonebridge Capital also put some money into the round.

Playnery specializes, notes TheNextWeb, in 3D RPG gaming, whilst also making the titles social and playable in any recent web browser. The startup uses its own, self-developed 3D gaming engine. In this way, it’s pushing forward the current social gaming model of simplistic action that began with things like Farmville. The investment arm of Japanese telco Softbank is clearly impressed with this new vision for social and mobile gaming; SoftBank Ventures’ Seo Il-shik said today:

In the future we predict that the social and mobile market will break off from the casual gaming seen up until now, and achieve rapid growth with the diversification of genres such as MORPG, MMORPG, and FPS. When various user groups form and the market grows rapidly, we expect that Playnery will become a successful game developer through high quality games and global partnerships.

It’s not Softbank Ventures’ first foray into social gaming in the region, as it has also backed South Korea’s SundayToz, makers of the hit game Anipang.

Playnery’s first game, Mother of Myth, is due to launch next year, and is aiming for a global rollout in 12 languages, and will be playable on Zynga’s (NASDAQ:ZNGA) gaming platform, on Facebook (NASDAQ:FB), and as iOS and Android apps. Until then, there’s this interesting demo video of how the game will play:

(Video link for mobile readers)

[Source: TheNextWeb]

Mig33, Indonesia’s largest mobile social network on feature phones, together with Universal Musik Indonesia, launched a competition today called “Mig33 Fanatik.” The competition will send a minimum of five winners to go to Miami and watch Justin Bieber and Carly Rae Japsen in concert on January 27th, 2013.

To enter the competition, you will need to upload a 30- to 90-second video that shows how fanatical you are about either Justin Bieber or Carly Rae Japsen. Five people with the highest number of likes will receive the tickets, while a few additional winners will be decided by the judges from media partners and sponsors.

Those extra winners will be decided by Indonesian telco Indosat and radio channel Prambors.
Other ways to win this competition is by activating the Mig33 data package during the competition period with an IM3 Indosat number. The package will be launched tomorrow. While Prambors will hold a surprise ‘Mendadak Hits’ quiz which will send away one more winner to Miami.

Click to enlarge. No, Justin’s not in the photo, so you probably won’t bother.

The competition starts for one month from November 15th to December 14th. The winners will be announced the next day, which is December 15th. To enter this competition, you have to be aged between 14 to 25 years old, an Indonesian citizen, own a Mig33 account, and you must have purchased a genuine CD album of Bieber or Japsen between the period of November 1st to December 14th.

Kiki Rizki, the country manager of Mig33 Indonesia, said that the Mig33 Fanatik competition was built based on their understanding of Indonesian teens’ aspirations. This competition isn’t only a program to meet their idols, insists the gaming company, but also a way to get young adults to be directly inspired by their idols.

The competition will attract a lot of female music fans in the country, just like with Lazada’s One Direction contest held last month. This is made even more obvious by the poster, which seems to be focusing on Bieber rather than Carly. I wonder if this sort of online competition is going to become a trend in the coming months among Indonesian web companies. For more information about the Mig33 Fanatik competition, you can check it out here.

[UPDATED two hours after publishing: Corrected the author attribution; UPDATE 2: Removed a line written by the editor with an erroneous detail].

Colopl at Tokyo Game Show 2012

Over on Asiajin, Chiho Komoriya points out that Japanese game developer Colopl Inc. announced early this month their eponymous location-based game platform has surpassed the 3 million user milestone. We featured Colopl about a year ago, and at that time (July 2011) they were just under 2 million registered users [1].

The company celebrated its four-year anniversary this month, having been established back in October of 2008. Since then, the company’s smartphone apps have accumulated over 10 million downloads, including Treasure Detective which passed the 2 million downloads mark just last month.

The company’s Colopl platform began back in November of 2010, and it currently has 14 location-based games under its umbrella. Its notion of ‘Entertainment in Real Life’ is an interesting one, as the notion of implementing a check-in type mechanism in gameplay is unique, with potential room for innovation in areas like tourism, where the company has been establishing profitable partnerships.

I’m still waiting for an official location-based Pokemon game though. That would be very, very cool.

At the recent Tokyo Game Show I was a little surprised to see that Colopl has such a big presence, its booth showcasing its recent Kuma the Bear title. But the company appears to be doing some fun stuff on the location-based gaming front, an area that most other gaming companies haven’t really explored as much.

[Colopl via Asiajin]

Readers may remember that we recently featured Nijibox (nijibox.jp), a Japanese game developer whose Costume Fantasia title has recently been pushed to Southeast Asia via the mig33 platform. The company was founded in 2010 and currently has 125 employees at its headquarters in Tokyo. Interestingly Nijibox is owned by Japanese human resource giant Recruit, and I confess I was a little curious to learn how a company like Recruit could spawn a gaming company. I had a chance to visit Nijibox recently to find out more.

The founder of Nijibox is Yoichi Aso, who worked with Recruit in advertising from 2006 to 2008. But back when companies like Mixi, GREE, and DeNA were getting into mobile, he thought it might be a promising new business opportunity for Recruit as well. He proposed his ideas as a part of Recruit’s internal ‘New Ring’ system, which the company uses to source new ideas from its employees.

Yoichi Aso, Nijibox

Recruit subsequently invested some capital and Yoicho and a small team began to develop mobile services under the name of ‘Media Technology Labs,’ a sort of internet R&D group under the Recruit umbrella. They would launch more than 30 mobile information services as part of that project.

In November of 2010 Nijibox was founded, as Recruit decided to invest in the mobile social application market. As GREE and Mobage opened their platforms to third party developers, Nijibox launched several titles in its first year, including Serukira, Band Stadium, and TV Battler. In just a few years since it began, Nijibox has already released 237 titles, which Yoichi claims makes them one of the most prolific developers in Japan.

Nijibox’s development process, as I understand it, is very modular, which means that many of the same core building blocks can be applied to many of their games. Overall now, their games account for more than five million active users in total. In total, the company currently develops for about 25 different social game platforms, including GREE, Mobage, Hangame, iOS, Android, and Facebook.

In addition to Indonesia, Nijibox is now looking to expand to other Asian countries as well, including Korea, Malaysia, and China. Its new title Conquista Fantasia (not to be confused with Costume Fantasia) was released for Android just last month (see screenshots below). And for China, the company will team up with Shanda Interactive as its localizing partner for its Conquista Fantasia title for iOS, which is expected to be released soon.

It’s just over three weeks until Chinaccelerator 2012 officially graduates its newest flock of startups, but we’re already seeing some of the incubated businesses get going. One of these is AdConnect, whose AppSpree is an app cross-promotion network for small startups. For now, the service is free.

Co-founder Andrew Boos is originally from Toronto but is now busy honing AppSpree at Chinaccelerator HQ in Dalian, Northeast China – but the startup will eventually be based in Beijing with its five current full-timers.

Andrew pitches AppSpree as “a zero-cost way to help apps grow” as an alternative to its “expensive or opaque” larger rivals. It has the full array of stats and an analytics dashboard that developers need to see how the cross-promotions are benefitting their apps. Coming later, says Andrew, will be “substantial targeting” of ads and “full cost-per-action” options for things like acquiring new Weibo followers. Essentially, he says, it’s “an [ad] impressions swap – totally costless” and “less intimidating, more simple” for younger startups to use. “We’ll keep it free up to a threshold,” Andrew reckons.

Connecting apps and sharing users

AdConnect’s AppSpree will focus on Chinese apps, and will soon have more options for cross-promoting by app genres, regions, and language.

“The tricky part is behind us,” says Andrew, as all the service infrastructure is now done, and the website has just gone up in both English and Chinese. The next step is to get developers on board whilst also meeting with investors and practicing for the Chinaccelerator demo day on October 31st. He admits that there’s just one app developer signed up so far, so a few more fledgling apps from “growth-related startups” are needed to get the network moving.

It’ll be up against Chinese ad platforms like Guohe, or Innovation Works-backed Umeng. But Andrew identifies Papaya’s AppFlood as closer to what they’re working on – albeit with a different model.

Expectations will be high for the Chinaccelerator 2012 graduates. Of last year’s batch, OrderWithMe quickly went on to win TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing, and then the funky Piktochart made a strong showing at our own StartupArena Singapore contest earlier this year. We’ve already looked at one of this year’s Chinaccelerator chosen ones, WeiboAgent, which is a a SaaS advisory tool built on top of social media analytics for Sina Weibo, China’s hottest Twitter-esque service.

So if you have a burgeoning app on iOS or Android (with support for WP coming later), reach out to AppSpree and perhaps join its network.

GREE booth at Tokyo Game Show 2012

Japanese gaming giant GREE (TYO:3632) is announcing a new developer program that aims to support independent developers in the United States.

It’s called ‘GREE Loves Indies’ and the plan is to offer developers and small studios access to GREE’s resources and expertise. The company will also hold an ‘Indie of the Month’ contest where developers are invited to submit their games to be considered for a four to six week launch and release support campaign. Applications for the first contest are due on November 2nd.

Over the next few days at GDC Online in Austin, Texas, developers can visit GREE to find out more about the program. Eros Resmini, the SVP of developer relations and marketing at GREE International noted:

[Indie developers] are responsible for pushing the limits of creativity and driving innovation within the mobile industry and I feel we have a responsibility to give them the tools and knowledge they need to work their magic.

More Indie Partners

GREE also recently announced a number of new indie development partners in North America for its mobile gaming platform. Those partners are:

• Fifth Column Games, Inc – Located in San Francisco, this game studio was founded in 2011 and has developed games for console, mobile, web, and PC.
• Enders Fund, Inc – A mobile game studio also based out of San Francisco. TriviaThis will be among one of its first titles to be featured on GREE’s platform.
• Fathom Interactive – Based in Vancouver, Fathom is a developer and outsourcing partner. It hopes to have its popular Sky Pirates title on GREE’s platform by the end of the year.
• FreezeTag, Inc – This California-based developer creates casual games for mobile, PC, and Mac. Its Party Animals title will launch for GREE sometime this year.

Photo: Google Play

Indonesia is celebrating Batik Day today, as you might’ve noticed from our two previous posts on the subject ^[1]. Batik is Indonesia’s traditional patterned cloth often worn as garments. Now, from the creator of Toresto, comes a new puzzle game called Batik Swap which shows you the beauty of this piece of Indonesian herritage.

To play, you need to swap two tiles by tapping the screen until all of the tiles are in their correct spot. You will see a preview of how the design should look before beginning to play the puzzle.

The CEO of the game’s developer team, GITS Indonesia, is Ibnu Sina Wardy, who describes Batik Swap in the Id-Android mailing list as a simple yet small game. Ibnu wrote that all you have to do is stack the images so that the batik pattern is intact.

It sounds so easy. But, it could get really confusing. The challenges are in the numbers of moves you can make – and the time limit. Plus, the batik pattern details can get really complicated; indeed, batik patterns tend to be relatively repetitive and hard to guess, therefore making every level in Batik Swap a real puzzler. The level of difficulty in Batik Swap can also be customized by selecting the puzzle size. Players can choose a size that’s 3×3, 4×4, or 5×5. If you find it difficult to solve, just pick the escape route by pressing “hint”.

By playing this Android game app, you will be introduced to batik patterns from all across the Indonesian map. It’s divided into seven major islands in seven levels. Level one is in Sumatra and the ending is in Papua as it reaches level seven. And so the player will learn that batik has different families of designs. Ibnu adds:

It took one week to develop this game. The next development is a high score system and integration with social media.

Batik Swap is available for Android phones, and there’s a HD version for tablets. It’s a fun way to know more and explore the beauty of batik designs. And it’s a free app in Android’s Google Play. Enjoy your batik day!

Shanghai's Pudong biz district skyline turns green. Photo courtesy of Rovio Mobile.

Rovio Mobile will launch its much-anticipated Angry Birds spin-off game, called Bad Piggies, later today, and the company has taken to the roads of China to promote it. Last night, in a neat publicity stunt, the Shanghai Pudong skyline was turned green (pictured above) by a light-projection of the Bad Piggies, those dastardly nemeses of the understandably frustrated birdies.

But that’s not all. As spotted by lots of Sina Weibo users, there are two elaborately painted vans going round Shanghai (pictured below). The red van represents the Angry Birds, and the green one for the piggies. We’ve confirmed with the Rovio office in Beijing Shanghai that the vans are “official and a part of our Bad Piggies launch” – but it’s not clear what time exactly the new game will roll-out in China, and the game developer is keeping it under wraps for now. All we know is that it should hit iOS, Android, and Mac pretty much simultaneously sometime today.

[Update: Bad Piggies is available here]

Both photos via Weibo user @万里行房车 taken today in Shanghai.

Bad Piggies will be the the second different title (following the puzzler Amazing Alex) after the huge global success of the four Angry Birds series games. China was a huge part of that success, as seen with the local Rovio office and versions of the original game that used familiar cultural themes, such as Angry Birds Seasons for Chinese New Year, and even one for the autumnal Moon Festival. If Bad Piggies prove as popular, then we’ll likely see similar adaptations – and lots more cutesy piggy merchandise too.

It has been such a rough year for Chinese stocks on overseas markets that yesterday the China Mobile Games and Entertainment Group (CMGE) became only the second company from the country to list in the US this year. Yesterday its NASDAQ:CMGE ticker hit the trading floor where the mobile gaming firm took the unusual path of listing ‘by way of introduction’.

This backdoor listing method means that CMGE has hit the market, but isn’t necessarily going for an IPO of its shares. Yet. It also means there’s no price. But as the China Daily notes, the reception that CMGE got wasn’t all that warm:

The company’s American depositary shares (ADS), each representing 14 Class A ordinary shares, began to trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol CMGE but failed to settle a price on its debut.

As of Tuesday’s close, investors had put in a high bid price of $3.90 per share, not even close to the ask price of 40 dollars.

Click to enlarge

CMGE claims to be China’s biggest mobile gaming developer and publisher, and is a spin-off from VODone, the massive semi-state-owned media company. CMGE’s chariman, Zhang Lijun (pictured center in the image on the right), told state news agency Xinhua yesterday that the firm doesn’t urgently need financing at the moment, and is happy using the listing just to raise its profile at home and overseas. But even without the full IPO, CMGE must now file financial reports to the US SEC.

The company might want to wait for a better economic climate – and warmer attitudes towards Chinese tech stocks, so tarnished by last year’s Longtop financial scandal – before going for the full IPO.

CMGE is NASDAQ’s first Chinese stock this year. The only other US lister from the nation this year was the flash sales site VIPShop (NYSE:VIPS), which is currently slightly up on its $6.50 debut at $6.90 per share.

Photo: Apple App Store

After a rapid jounrney from being a Flash game to PCs to mobile gaming, Infectonator is now out on Android and iOS. Indonesian startup developer Toge Production launched the smartphone versions on September 24th, 2012 with a price tag of $0.99 on both Google Play and the iTunes App Store. Infectonator still brings the same recipe to the mobile game: infecting people, turning them into zombies, and dominating the world.

Before its official release, a fake version dubbed “Infectonator 2” was released on Google Play. But that was illegally ported as an Android app from Toge’s Flash-based game by an account under the name Hasan Akyurek. This award-winning game developer based in Indonesia was furious about this hijacking of its popular game. But now the rogue title has been taken down.

The new Infectonator game has language support for English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and lots of world languages – and of course Indonesian too. There are also more than 10 unique zombies to play with.

The Infectonator storyline places the player as the person who spreads the virus which turns humans into zombies. You need to decide which city is the target to launch the virus. This will affect the rest of the game. The challenge is to keep the endurance of your brain-dead workforce. In a limited time before the zombies run out of energy, you will have to kill all of the population. And yes, there will be blood. Also there will be coins falling from the pockets of citizens, which you’ll need to collect. Your objective is to destroy all humanity and dominate the world.

The pleasure of playing with a touchscreen phone replaces the way you control the game when it was a Flash game. No longer is there a need to fiddle with the mouse, and now you can just swipe to collect the coins from the victims.

As for monetization in the mobile version, it has in-app purchases for coins to increase the ability of your zombie troops. There is even a package deal to open a whole zombie army. If you don’t want to spend more, you have to be more patient to collect all the coins in the game for getting upgrades.

Are you ready to rule the world with zombies? Get Infectonator in Android’s Google Play or Apple App Store. See the video demo here:

[Source: Kompas.com - article in Indonesian]

Tokyo Game Show 2012

I had a chance to visit the Tokyo Game Show over the weekend, and as many have pointed out the event is seeing smartphones and social games moving in on territory previously dominated by console gaming.

Looking at the breakdown of games by platform, you can see that smartphones by far make up the lion’s share of games exhibited [1]. Perhaps part of this is due to the fact that you can display a mobile game in far less space than you can a console game. But surely it represents a passing of the torch as well, as exhibitors like Nintendo and Microsoft no longer have dedicated areas at the game show [2].

Like last year, GREE was the biggest exhibitor of mobile social games with a huge booth that was perhaps only rivaled by game developer and operator Gloops. Readers may recall that on Thursday, Gloops struck a deal with DeNA to bring new titles to North America, Europe, China, and South Korea in the coming years [3]. GREE still drew much attention with prominent displays for games like Wacky Motors, Metal Gear Solid, and the upcoming title War Corps.

[Download image version of this chart]

And while the big names in mobile gaming were certainly fun to see, I was pleased to see game companies from other countries around Asia representing at the show. An Indonesian booth highlighted notable gaming companies from that country (Agate Studios and Altermyth), and even Malaysian game companies made an appearance.

Chinese game developers were in attendance, but not particularly active with a number of empty chairs in front of most of the booths I visited [4]. Surprisingly, Taiwan had an active presence with Art and Mobile Entertainment leading the way showing off a number of games across many platforms.

There was also a big representation of student game developers at the show, and we hope to follow up with them soon and bring you more details on what they are working on, particularly in the space of mobile games.

You can find more photos from the 2012 Tokyo Game Show over on our Facebook page.

The final chapter of the Jakarta Governor’s election started this morning as second-round voting began. To celebrate democracy in the capital city of Indonesia, AR&Co. have launched an app called “jakARta Pilkada for Android” (meaning “Jakarta Election for Android”). Upon starting the app you will be welcomed with some familiar “Jakarta faces” such as Ondel-ondel (the traditional puppet of Jakarta’s ethnic group), a businessman, a criminal, q politician, and a rat (as a symbol of corruption).

With this app, you can play a game to match card pictures based on the candidates. But you will need to download and print its content from AR&Co website. The camera of your Android device will track the printed picture to pop out nine cards. You then have only 30 seconds to pair the cards, which bear the faces of the governor and vice governor candidates. It uses the augmented reality (AR) know-how of the developers pretty well.

If you win, you can take a cartoony picture in the signature campaign style. As shown in the demo video below, place your head in the checked shirt to be a Joko Widodo supporter. You can even put a mustache on your face if you choose the incumbent candidate, Fauzi Bowo. The pictures taken will be saved in your Android phone.

The need to print the picture reduces the pleasure of this app. But the printed picture is what makes this app truly an AR game. Yet you can avoid the printing by downloading the pictures to another device, so you just point the camera at the other screen. You can also play in pairs.

It’s an interesting alternative to the two official games released earlier by the candidates, Fauzi and Joko.

AR&Co’s MD, Peter Shearer, says that this app is trying to bring positivity to the election. He explains:

As an educated and creative people, Jakarta residents can show support for the election through creative acts to spread a positive message.

He reckons the negative issues that dogged this election campaign are not considered appropriate in such an important event that will determine the future of the city.

You can download this free app in Google Play. Don’t forget to download the tracking file from AR&Co. website. Also, here’s a very brief demo video: