Japan's GREE Partners with Social Game Developers CrowdStar and iWin

Japanese mobile social gaming giant GREE (TYO:3632) has announced partnerships with a pair of prominent social game developers, in CrowdStar and iWin.

According to the announcement, the partnership with CrowdStar will bring the popular Top Girl franchise to the GREE platform. As we’ve mentioned before, GREE will be exhibiting at the E3 game conference this June, and it will be there that the company unveils Top Girl for the first time. That title, when it launched for iOS last year, hit a million downloads in just ten days. CrowdStar’s CEO Peter Relan noted the importance of coming to a strong global platform like GREE:

GREE and Crowdstar share the same idea that without social connections and a way for people to discover and interact in and around games, the industry will stall.

As for iWin, a successful online developer and operator of a casual gaming portal, it will be bringing two mobile social games based on popular TV shows exclusively to the GREE platform, in Deal or No Deal and 1 vs 100. CJ Wolf, the VP of publishing at iWin commented on the partnership:

As casual gamers’ play time shifts to mobile devices, iWin’s goal is to make our content accessible where gamers are playing. Our game show games are inherently social so iWin was seeking a partner that could provide a large social footprint on mobile and GREE was the best choice given their global community.

GREE is gradually expanding its games offering for the North American market, having recently launched the titles Zombie Jombie and Alien Family. Similarly, its chief rival DeNA is also making efforts to expand abroad, and recently announced some success with Rage of Bahamut hitting number one on the top grossing apps list for Android.