The reason why the world should take notice of GREE is the fact that the Japanese company had over $2 billion in revenue last year. The company already has 190 million users globally and is aiming for 1 billion members in 3 to 5 years.
“The GREE Platform is conceptually like OpenFeint, but it’s more of a social experience,” said GREE SVP of marketing and developer relations Eros Resmini. “You could think of OpenFeint as being more like Xbox Live in terms of its focus on competition.”
“There really is no one else in the space that has been operating platforms for as long as GREE has. Clearly, experience counts for a lot in the space, and we’ve got a lot of it,” said Resmini. “We think that over time, mobile will be the dominant place for gamers to go, and we have a tremendous amount of experience on mobile specifically. Brand adoption and brand awareness is gonna be important for us outside of Japan. Fortunately for us, we have a tremendous amount of experience built in from the OpenFeint network alone.”
Despite the success and ambitions, the company does have some hurdles to overcome. “Do you really see millions of users in the US, Europe, and Asia prefer playing games on GREE and Mobage over Facebook and the others ,” asks Serkan Toto, consultant on Japanese social gaming. “GREE and DeNA are poised to fail outside Japan – at least as platform providers.”
Toto notes that carrier billing, a 96 percent penetration of mobile phones in the population, affordable mobile data plans, and reliable 3G networks aren’t a given outside of Japan. Furthermore, Japan’s ARPU (average revenue per user) for social games are higher than other countries.
GREE’s success was also built upon distinctly Japanese titles, like card battle games, dating simulations, and social horse racing games. Moreover, there’s increasing competition from other companies like DeNA, Zynga and Papaya, so despite its large cash excess, there’s no guarantee of worldwide success.
Source: TechCrunch
