Mobile social game giant ready to join Korean market

GREE’s senior executive says it seeks strategic partnerships with Korean firms


COLOGNE, Germany ― GREE, a Japan-based mobile social game firm, said Friday that it plans to dive into the Korean market after establishing a game studio in the region this year.

Ryotaro Shima, senior vice president at GREE, said that Korea is an attractive market for the company and has many good engineers.

“We’ve already established a game studio in Korea and we’re developing games suitable for the Korean market,” he said in an interview.

The company also signed an agreement for a strategic partnership with major game developer NCsoft to develop a mobile version of the Korean firm’s popular title “Lineage” earlier this month.

“We’re having a lot of conversations with them and seeing a lot of opportunities. But I can’t unveil the details,” he said.

The company is also looking for further partnerships with Korean game players to collaborate on some titles and also to make investments in them, said Shima.

The firm is expected to meet fierce competition in the Korean market, however, it expects to combine its year’s worth of experience in the Japanese mobile social game sector with the skills of Korean engineers to produce games with unique features, according to the executive.

The mobile game giant, which now has a subscription base of about 234 million people, came to gamescom, one of the world’s biggest game tradeshows, for the first time this year with titles like Wacky Motors, Moshi Monsters and Metal Slug.

Having just launched its global platform, GREE plans to offer its free-to-play games in 14 languages.

Shima also said he remains optimistic about the mobile social game market in Europe as the number of smartphone users is increasing every day.

“From the entire social network phenomenon, it’s positive,” he said. “More and more mobile players have booths here and it’s impressive. Last year, the focus was console games.”

The same moves were being staged at other game tradeshows like the Tokyo Game Show and the Electronic Entertainment Expo, also known as E3.

“We had the same size booth as Sony and Konami and it was a shock to the industry. It was telling that the industry was changing,” he said.

By Cho Ji-hyun, Korea Herald correspondent
(sharon@heraldcorp.com)