Big news from Asia’s social gaming world today: Tokyo-based mobile social games juggernaut GREE ($3 billion market cap) just announced it will tie up with China’s biggest web company Tencent ($45 billion market cap), which operates the massive QQ platform.

The plan is to “export” GREE’s social apps to the rapidly growing market for mobile games in China as well as to offer games made in China to GREE’s 22 million Japanese users. The focus of the partnership is on “GREE Platform for Smartphone”, which was announced by the company last year (more info).

Under the agreement, developers following the specifications of the platform will be able to offer games to users of GREE and Tencent. GREE has so far attracted over 200 companies in Japan to join the platform and says that Tencent will help them to localize their games for the Chinese market.

In the official press release, GREE cites a source according to which China had 120 mobile gamers in September last year. To put things into perspective: Japan’s Internet population stands at around 100 million.

GREE CEO Yoshikazu Tanaka announced the move into the Chinese market in summer last year. His company established a US subsidiary just a few days ago and also invested in Singapore-based mobile platform mig33.

Tags: China, Japan, News by Serkan Toto
No Comments »

Japan’s social apps boom isn’t ending: Today, two of the country’s biggest web companies, namely Mixi and CyberAgent, announced they will launch a joint venture to produce social apps for mixi, Japan’s biggest social network, on February 1. CyberAgent is best known for its massive Ameba blog platform, Japan’s biggest (12.4 million registered users).

The new venture, which is called Grenge (no website yet), is capitalized at 5 million yen ($606,000) and owned 51% by CyberAgent and 49% by mixi. Grenge is expected to produce apps for Japanese feature phones and smartphones from April this year. By March 2012, the plan is to have deployed a total of eight titles on Mixi.

Grenge is expected to generate $6 million in sales by September this year.

What’s interesting is that with this move, mixi is moving further away from its position as a strict, “neutral” social network/graph provider. Its big rivals in terms of user numbers, mobile gaming networks Mobage-town and GREE, have been doubling as platform and app providers since they opened their sites to third-party developers in 2009/2010.

In 2009, Mixi established the so-called Mixi Fund to invest in startups that provide social apps. Since then, big M has invested in several companies, for example in Tokyo-based social games startup Pikkle ($1.6 million).

Tags: Company, Japan, New Service by Serkan Toto
No Comments »