Big news from Asia’s social games industry today: Japanese mobile social gaming juggernaut GREE and mig33, a mobile community that’s especially popular in Asia, have just announced [PDF] a cooperation with the potential to change the social gaming market in the region.
Under the agreement, mig33 adopts the “GREE platform for smartphone”, which means that smartphone games that have been created using the technical specifications of GREE’s Japanese platform can now be easily ported to mig33, and vice versa.
The cooperation isn’t only a win for the two companies but should also be a big deal for mobile social game makers, as GREE and mig33 combined have over 70 million users – mostly in markets where the mobile web is bigger than the fixed web.
As background, GREE is a social gaming network that can so far only be accessed through Japanese feature and smart phones (roughly speaking, it’s like Facebook and Zynga rolled into one). The company is listed at the Tokyo Stock Exchange since December 2008 and currently boasts a market cap of $3.6 billion.
In January, GREE inked a deal similar to the one announced today with China’s Tencent. An American entity, GREE International, was launched earlier this year, which means we will probably hear more from the company about its plans in the US soon.
mig33, on the other hand, is focused on the Middle East, the Asian and African markets where it currently counts 47 million members. Last November, Project Goth, the California-based company behind mig33, sold a stake to GREE in its series C venture round.
GREE provides Japan’s leading mobile social network, and is at the forefront of mobile technology. GREE was ranked as Japan’s fastest-growing tech company by Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Ltd. in 2009 and 2010. GREE, following its acquisition of OpenFeint in April 2011, is expanding globally and will soon offer a single, worldwide mobile social gaming platform. Combined, GREE reaches over 190 million players and offers over 7,500 game applications for smartphones. GREE aims to build the leading mobile social gaming...
Mig33 is a mobile download application that brings a potent mix of social networking, IM and VoIP features to mobile phones. Any mobile device that can run Java and connect to the Internet can use Mig33. Once installed, users can perform all the basic social networking actions, including creating profiles, sending photos, friending and messaging. Mig33 supports chat rooms, separate from the IM feature. Users can also make VoIP calls when logged in.
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