GREE’s Billboard in SF: Huge in Japan. Growing Here… Growing Everywhere!

After splashing a good chunk of its marketing budget at the Tokyo Game Show (TGS), GREE has now rolled out a billboard in San Francisco (hat-tip: Serkan). But the new billboard isn’t what strikes me as news here. What I find interesting is the message. GREE states in its billboard that it is huge in Japan and wants to grow here, in the U.S. But in fact, GREE is growing everywhere.

GREE isn’t shy about its plan to move full steam ahead in the U.S. In a blog post, the company said that it now has hired over 40 people in the states and the team will grow even bigger in the near future. The Japan-based mobile gaming company has hired a creative agency in an effort to push out its brand in San Francisco. This will not be the last billboard from GREE.

In GMIC 2011, founder and CEO Yoshikazu Tanaka shared his overseas ambitions, pointing to American and Chinese markets as keys for his expansion roadmap. He has apparently laid the foundation well, through the acquisition of OpenFeint (U.S) and a partnership with Tencent (China).

It’s not just U.S and China, but GREE’s presence is in almost every part of the world, or at least is soon to be. It has partnered with mig33 for the Southeast Asia market, with SK telecom in Korea, and invested in China’s Ultizen. It has also announced five new offices. Three of them will be established in October at Seoul, Singapore, and London, another two will be established early next year at Netherlands and Brazil.

Similarly, rival DeNA is also establishing offices in Korea and Singapore. It has also partnered with AT&T in the US and has launched the Chinese version Mobage in July this year. The battle is far from over but I somehow sense that GREE has an edge over DeNA, simply because it appears more willing to work with local partners to help it scale faster (catch the video below).

As I last wrote, the Tencent-GREE-mig33 partnership effectively allows a GREE mobile game developer to put its game onto all three platforms, with localization aid (e.g. translation, mentoring) provided. DeNA, on the other hand, single-handedly runs Mobage Japanese, English, and Chinese version and has NetDragon as a local partner in China. Nonetheless, its reach is not as wide as GREE’s but again, this battle is still far from over.

A video interview Rick did with GREE at TGS (turn on captions for English sub):