CrowdStar Continues Mobile Gaming Push, with Top Girl Localizations for China and Korea

CrowdStar's Top Girl

Readers may recall a couple of weeks back that we reported about social game developer CrowdStar, and its partnership to bring its Top Girl franchise to the GREE platform. And today there’s more news from the company, as it is building more significant gaming alliances in the Asia region. CrowdStar will be creating localized versions of Top Girl for China via a partnership with internet giant Tencent, and one for South Korea through mobile games developer Gamevil.

For Chinese localization, CrowdStar could certainly do worse than to tie up with Tencent. We have already seen prominent games like Zynga’s Cityville, EA’s The Sims Social, and most recently PopCap’s Plants vs Zombies come to China via partnerships with Tencent. When we last looked at industry wide revenue figures, Tencent was China’s gaming leader, accounting for 29.5 percent of of all online games revenue back in the second quarter of 2011.

CrowdStar says that its localized versions of Top Girl and Tower Town titles will be released for Apple’s iOS, and distributed by Tencent across the Greater China region (including Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau).

As for Korea, Gamevil will localize Top Girl for Android and promote it on the nation’s major carriers (SK Telecom, KT, and LG) giving it the potential to reach a significant portion of Korea’s 20 million smartphone users.

CrowdStar’s head of global business development, Randy Lee, noted the company’s Asia ambitions in the announcement:

In the U.S., Top Girl Android debuted as an exclusive on the Amazon App Store in December after the iOS version of the game saw enormous popularity, surpassing one million downloads in 10 days. We’re optimistic about seeing more impressive results with our new partners in Asia.

Earlier this month CrowdStar announced that it raised $11.5 million in a new round of funding, moving away from Facebook games in favor of a “much bigger opportunity” in mobile games.