Game On: KakaoTalk Brings Social Gaming Platform to Indonesia and Vietnam

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).