Video game industry launches a tug of battle Nintendo Microsoft Sony Trio

Beijing Time June 14 News, foreign media published in Wednesday Analysis article said, video game industry is launching a seesaw battle, but the main role of the war became Gree, DeNA, Zynga and other companies, is not video game three giants Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony.

The war in the smartphone game market includes companies such as Japanese game developer Gree, Japan's biggest social-gaming operator Dena, and the US social-game developer, Zynga, and may include Apple and Google.

Zynga already has a huge user base in the social gaming market, but it is still a novice in the smartphone gaming market. Gree and Dena in Japan have a large number of users, the above two companies to provide users with free games, props fees games. Although the two companies have launched hundreds of games, the best known are solitaire and casual games. But outside the Japanese market, Gree and Dena remain obscure. The challenge is similar to that of Japanese electronics, where Japan's electronics companies have been successful globally and are now facing difficulties.

David Gibson, analyst at Macquarie Securities in Tokyo, said: "Gree, Dena are vying for turf, and Zynga is David Gibson." "With the global mobile gaming market starting to solid, the competition has become white-hot." Last month, Gree announced 210 million dollars to buy Funzio. Zynga spent $183 million this March to buy the developer Omgpop of the Draw something.

Zynga still lags behind its Japanese rivals in turning users into paid users. According to Macquarie Securities, the average monthly income of the gree to $11.21 trillion, and the average monthly income of Dena to $6.50 per user. Although Zynga already has 292 million users worldwide, its average monthly income is just 0.33 dollars per user. So far, Zynga has not been able to.

This March, Zynga launched a social gaming platform for Third-party developers. While the platform is currently focused on PCs and online gaming, Zynga executives say the platform will eventually expand into the mobile gaming market.

Over the past few years, the expansion of tablets and smartphones has changed the business model of video games for mobile devices. Free games become a new opportunity to replace a one-time purchase of the game program. Free mode is to allow players to play for free, but for internal purchases, or new weapons or other virtual items.

Gree, DeNA, Zynga and other companies are now looking to build a mobile gaming world around the core social network, with players connected to the social web. The network allows players to send messages and provide virtual currency.

In the changing game market, becoming a platform can bring a stable revenue source. The platform can be divided into 30% from the game transaction, the game is from the developer. This platform will emerge when fragmented mobile gaming markets begin to integrate.

Ichiyoshi Nomura, a london-based securities firm, said in a report that the global mobile gaming market had reached $3.77 billion trillion in 2010. By 2015, the market is expected to grow by nearly 4 times times to $17.6 billion trillion.

There are still big questions about whether gaming companies ' platforms can attract users, compared to social networks such as Facebook. Because platforms like Facebook already have a large number of user groups before they open the platform to application developers. "I'm not sure if such a social network can cater to the needs of consumers," said Greg Richardson, chief executive of Rumble Entertainment, an online gaming innovation firm. "Game developers have paid 30% of the revenue share to Apple, Google and Microsoft, and the systems of these companies are respected," he said. Game developers must also give 30% of the remaining revenue to the standalone gaming platform.

Apple's approach is to add new features to its gaming-centric service (Game Cente), which poses additional hurdles to the survival of gaming mobile social platforms. Apple said in a Monday global developer conference that the iOS 6 operating system, which will be listed this fall, would carry more than 200 new features, including allowing gamers to compete in the game with friends, and being able to sync the game center with Facebook's buddy list to make it easier for players to find friends.

Gree and Dena think they can offer marketing and distribution support, allowing the game to stand out from thousands of other games. In addition, they can provide advice and analysis tools to allow the game to guide the player to pay, and also provide a backend technology architecture for the software to run in balance. The company's approach has already shown some signs of success. Recently, a combat game, "Ham's Wrath," was released on Dena's Mobage platform. It has been the hottest American game in Google's App store for the past six weeks and is currently ranked first in the app store of Apple apps.

The success of Ham's wrath is significant because it is a third-party game that Dena helped to promote, and it is a rare case of Japanese mobile games surviving in the United States. Dena did not provide specific data, saying only that the US paid player spends as much as the Japanese peers, buying more than 3% of the total players, the highest level of the original target.

"Not every game that succeeds in the Japanese market will succeed in the US market, but it can be achieved if localized," said Otoma Aoyagi, Gree International CEO of Gree US subsidiary. ”

At the beginning of May this year, gree and Dena shares tumbled more than 20% per cent after the Japanese Consumer affairs agency announced investigations into Gree and Dena to verify whether the "complete gacha" function of two companies had an illegal effect, and two companies subsequently said will stop using this payment function.

This May, Gree opened up its own platform and Japanese players could compete with their American or European friends. By September this year, Gree will run 60 games in 14 language versions. Gree hopes to eventually become a platform with 1 billion users.

Dena's Mobage platform has been providing games to Android since January 2011 and has offered games to Apple in March. In Japan, it offers more than 1000 social games to feature handsets, and the company has 48 games for Android in the US, 7 for iOS. Zynga has 9 games on anroid and 19 on iOS.

2010 Dena 403 million dollars to buy game platform developer Ngmoco. Ngmoco chief Financial Officer Shintaro Asako said: "People originally thought that the Japanese game game is only suitable for the Japanese, this is not the case." ”