http://venturebeat.com/2013/03/22/com2us-rides-the-kakao-mobile-games-rocket-and-expands-to-the-u-s/
In South Korea, Com2Us has hit celebrity status. Jiyoung Park [above],
who cofounded the mobile game company while she was a student in
college, is one of the best known female CEOs in Korean history. And the
company is starting to benefit from games that are available on fast-growing mobile messaging networks such as Kakao Talk
in South Korea. Com2Us has five games on Kakao, and they have become
the company’s biggest titles. It also has two titles on Japan’s similar
Line service.
“On our own platform, it took us five to six months to grow a game to
1 million daily active users,” Park said in an interview with
GamesBeat. “On Kakao, it takes only two weeks to one month to get to a
million users. The market is really changing.”
The top games on Kakao Talk (particularly on Android) are generating
$1 million to $2 million a day in revenue, just in the Korean market
alone, and that’s why 95 percent of the revenue on Google Play in Korea
now comes from games. Japan’s Line and China’s We Chat are also taking
off. The question is whether this new craze for mobile games is limited
to Asia, or it could take off here too. If it does, then game developers
will have a powerful way to get their games discovered. That’s a huge
problem in an age of app stores with hundreds of thousands of competing
titles.
Park said that the growth of Kakao Talk reminds her of the growth of
Cyworld, which preceded Facebook as a major social network. Such
networks are a great way for game developers to get more users, as
friend recommendations are trusted and a great way to spread word of
mouth about a game. But Facebook discovered that users hate getting too
much spam from games, and it moved to limit it on its platform. That
slowed the growth of games, but it gave piece of mind to Facebook’s
non-gamers. Kakao and Line may run into the same thing, but Kakao
already limits the number of game invites.
Multiple game companies are benefiting from Kakao’s growth, which
reaches about 50 million people. That’s not a huge number, but it is a
very active market. In January, five Kakao titles were in the top 10
revenue generators on Google Play, even though not all of those titles
is ranked in the top 10 games in terms of downloads. The games are
light, with a lot of gifting that introduces new players to the games.
The popularity of these games is making the cost of acquiring users
lower. But the content is curated, so that it isn’t available to every game maker,
Park said. In Japan, the market is dominated by “battle card” games,
like GungH0 Entertainment’s Puzzle & Dragons. NHN’s Line dominates
there, but DeNA and Gree are setting up competing services.
One of the keys to the growth is that the mobile messenger services
access your contacts, which are people that you know. It contacts them
without using expensive text messages. By contrast, the U.S. doesn’t
have a dominant messenger service here. The closest equivalent might be
logging into Facebook on your iPhone.
The mobile messenger games are the latest craze for Com2Us, but this
company is not a flash in the pan. Park started the firm in 1998 (with
college friends) in the days of WAP phones, and the company went public
in 2007. It launched its first smartphone games in December, 2008. It
has 500 employees, including six in the U.S. It has offices in Korea,
Japan, and China. Com2Us has more than 60 games on the market, and it is
launching a graphics-heavy golf game in the U.S. The games generate 35
million monthly active users for Com2Us, including three million
subscribers.
Park realizes that the Korean market is small on the global stage.
While Koreans spend money, they will hit limits at some point. So that’s
why it is important for Com2Us to grow in the U.S. market and figure
out how to get people to behave the same way in the here.
“We want people to play more games in the U.S.,” said Don Lim,
general manager for Com2Us in the U.S. “It is a crucial market here. The
cultural backgrounds are different, but we will make games from the
bottom up to be suitable for the market here.”
One of the keys is upping the quality on 3D graphics for recent
titles on golf and snowboarding. That means it is taking more upfront
investment to make games, but the titles are still making use of
freemium models such as free-to-play with virtual goods sales. Right
now, all game development takes place in Korea, but U.S.-born developers
are making contributions to the games. One of Com2Us’s tower defense
games hit No. 2 for top-paid titles in the U.S. In the U.S., Park said
her company will launch 20 games this year. Over time, Com2Us will
publish more games made by other developers.
Overall, Park’s ambition is to make the company more relevant on the global stage of gaming.
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