Agate Studio Enters Feature Phone Gaming Battle in Indonesia With New Social Platform

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.