Aiming for the Top in Mobile Gaming: A Talk with COLOPL's Naruatsu Baba

Social Game Report is a website covering mobile social gaming run by Mynet Inc. It posts news and research on the market through Social Game Report and Twitter (@SocialGameRepo). The following contribution is from its chief editor, Wataru Tanaka.

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Reader’s may recall some of our past articles about an up-and-coming player in the mobile gaming space, COLOPL from Japan. COLOPL is a platform that uses GPS location data to provide services to mobile devices. It currently has over three million users. In 2008, COLOPL, Inc. was formed as a company around the service. The company stepped into the smartphone game space a year ago, and is now one of the leading players in Japan. As its global launch of Dino Dominion this month suggests, COLOPL is speeding up its worldwide expansion, and recently announced a planned IPO in Japan for December 13. We sat down with CEO Naruatsu Baba (pictured above) and asked him about the company’s ongoing strategies.

Since its founding, COLOPL has been known for location-based games. What inspired you to move into casual games for smartphones?

When COLOPL was founded in 2008, there were mostly only feature phones on the Japanese market. We used our COLOPL platform and its use of location data to target feature phones, offering a range of services, which included games. But at some point – and I think most people in the midst of this change noticed it – smartphones started to gain serious momentum, and it was soon very clear that smartphones would be the main player in the global market.

What aspects in particular caused you to notice that shift?

Well, we noticed that more and more users were moving to smartphones through our site. At the time, smartphones were only ten or twenty percent of total mobile devices, but active users were increasingly moving to them – seeing the numbers, we could tell it was a sizeable chunk of users. That trend for smartphones was getting stronger every day – we felt a sense of risk that the feature phone market might dry up at a point, so we wanted to branch out. It’s been a bit over a year since we started getting fully involved with smartphones.

What were your early efforts like?

When we first set out, we analyzed existing games and saw that the most popular were light, action-based titles that didn’t involve much data transfer while playing. We agreed that we should try following this formula and gave it a try.

I heard that the first title was made by you specifically.

I had heard that games made with Unity were getting hot, so I just played with the engine a bit as an experiment. After a bit of fiddling, I had a finished result I liked and we used that as the first title.

What was the reaction like when you released the first title?

There were way more downloads than I expected. We also made an English version and released it, and that, too, was downloaded much more than we thought it would be. Generating a similar volume of downloads with a feature phone title requires substantial advertising expense, so we were frankly astonished at how we just put the game on the market and it started being downloaded [on its own power].

What do you think are the reasons behind those downloads?

How are your user acquisition strategies? Any differences between Android and iOS? When it comes down to it, the key indicator of results is how often that person has had a crack at the bat – real experiences. Similarly, I think that maturing and developing comes down to how many successful experiences you’ve had. And putting those under your belt means you should swing that bat as much as possible. That’s why we think that releasing lots of games helps our staff mature – having that as an ongoing target and being able to experience it first-hand as part of the culture.