GREE Hopes New Dev Partnerships Will Help it Corner North American Mobile Games Market

Japanese social gaming giant GREE (TYO:3632) has made some new developments in its expansion into North America, with some key developer partnerships for his mobile social gaming platform to help solidify its efforts in the region. Here’s a quick overview of the indie developers it will be working with:

At GREE's botth at Tokyo Game Show 2011

• SkyVu Entertainment: Named one of the top developers of 2012, this is the studio behind Battle Bears which boasts 18 million downloads. SkyVu will release ‘Battle Bears Zero’ exclusively with GREE.
• InfiniDy: Based out of Kitchener-Waterloo in Canada, this social games developer will be brining its new Happy Zoo Park title to the GREE platform. Happy Park, its freemium theme park game, already has more than 5.3 million downloads worldwide.
• Oceanside Interactive: This L.A.-based social gaming company focuses on RPGs for iOS, Android and Facebook. Its title MyDinos uses the GREE Global platform.
• Gamenauts: Its game Ninja Fishing will be coming to the GREE platform in Q4 2012. It has over 7 million players worldwide, and might be a fun supplement to my previous Ninja Farm addiction (a title from CyberAgent).

Regarding the partnerships, GREE International’s senior director of developer relations Ben Chen noted:

There is no doubt that the indie community is responsible for pushing innovation in our industry, and we’re incredibly excited to see our new partners excel.

Serkan Toto also pointed out yesterday that Konami’s Dragon Collection, one of GREE’s biggest hits, is now on GREE Global via an English version over on the Canadian app store. However, he’s skeptical about its chances for success outside Japan.