Adways Indonesia Expands to Social Mobile Games

Adways Indonesia – a subsidiary of the Japanese advertising company Adways – is expanding its reach to social mobile games. The latest game, World of Monster (pictured above), is available now on Android, after launching earlier in some countries on iOS. Indonesian gamers won’t see the official localization of the game launch until April 2012 on iOS though. In Japanese, it’s dubbed Kaibutsu Chronicle (where ‘Kaibutsu’ means ‘monster’).

World of Monster is a social RPG game and it has already launched in Japan (iOS and Android), China (iOS only), and Taiwan (also just on iOS). The number of daily active users in Japan is up to 50,000, while the total number of users has reached 759,000, keeping World of Monster always in the top five apps in the Japanese iTunes AppStore for the last five months. Talking directly with Hayato Takano, the president of Adways Indonesia, he also mentioned that the revenue per day in Japan for this game is 2,000,000 yen ($25,726) on average. Adways – which opened its office in Indonesia in September – is planning to introduce this game to every Southeast Asia market one after another.

While the levels of traction and revenue in Japan are decent, Adways Indonesia doesn’t expect the money to be coming in from gaming just yet. The first goal, Hayato explains, is to get one million users as soon as possible, at least before the end of next year. When asked about the payment methods available for in-app purchases within the free app, he says that Adways Indonesia is planning to utilize a lot of e-payment systems – for example Paypal, or Google Checkout – and hoping to strike a deal for a telco payment system in some countries too.

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Adways Indonesia itself is a digital media consultancy specializing in targeted online marketing for companies in Indonesia, as the office’s profile page details. So far, its clients have included Japanese multinational companies – and that has helped to build the subsidiary’s Facebook profile and fan page. Adways expanded to Singapore on December 2nd, with the name Adways Innovations Singapore. Not only that, the Japanese ad platform company is planning to introduce an advertising system for Android and iOS called App Driver (pictured above). Hayato said that it won’t just work for their games but also for any other app and developer to use in order to monetize their mobile apps and analyze their usage. It sounds like the Chinese Umeng ad platform that my PO colleague reviewed recently.

While GREE (TYO:3632) and DeNA (TYO:2432) have been fighting it out in social games for quite a while, Adways has been among the first to make a move in the huge potential market of Indonesia (although GREE has been putting a special focus on Indonesia as well). The Indonesian mobile market is one of the biggest in the world, and so if Adways can get the payment system right – and easy – for users to purchase virtual items, then we can expect a decent turnover for Adways Indonesia in the next few years.

The free game is available in selected countries on both Android (version 2.1 and above) from the Android Market, and in the iTunes AppStore.