Japan’s Nijibox Makes Another Play for Emerging South East Asia Games Market

We recently interviewed Alvin Yap, the founder and CEO of Singapore-based TheMobileGamer (TMG), who operates mobile games service KotaGames for South and South East Asia. His insights on monetizing feature phones in emerging markets was an eye opener, and if you haven’t read that piece, go back and do so now.

One company that apparently agrees with Yap that South East Asia can be a lucrative games market is Tokyo-based game publisher Nijibox. The company is announcing today that it is releasing its Costume Fantasia game on the Kotagames platform, which has over 2.5 million users to date. Indonesia will be a key market for the mobile game, as it will be made available in English and Bahasa Indonesia. We understand that this will be the first third party title on Kotagames.

The title is a free-to-play card battle game for feature phones (see sample of girlie-tastic cards below), currently available on GREE, Mobage, Mixi, and Mig33. Astute readers will remember that it was just back in June with then Nijibox announced the global release of Costume Fantasia on Mig33. And a representative tells us today that it is doing pretty well, although we don’t have any exact metrics.

It’s interesting to see a Japanese game publisher jumping onto these feature phone platforms to try to win fans in the emerging South East Asia market. Lets see if more game developers from Japan and around Asia follow suit.