One of the first and largest mobile community service, Mig33, today announce that they’re partnering with Japanese social network platform, Gree where Mig33 will adopt Gree’s smartphone platform and also opening Mig33 community for social games developers in Japan and several other countries.
Mig33 now has over 47 million users and is opening the doors for developers to access their userbase, not to mention that all games on Gree now can easily adapted to run on mig33’s platform. This cross-port apps partnership could significantly increase the interest for developers to build apps on mig33’s platform, adding more and more content for mig33 users to tinker with.
This partnership apparently is an adaptation of Gree-Tencent previous partnership in China which mig33 adopt to its platform in mobile markets such as South East Asia, South Asia, Middle East and Africa. Mig33 has been promoting its service as an ecommerce platform with its fast-growing virtual economy as it expands, opening the floodgate for developers to build social games on top of their platform. Mig33 also pointed out that just like any other platform, developers are able to monetize from their apps to a previously untapped emerging mobile markets of users.
Steven Goh, CEO of mig33 through a press release said that this partnership will “change the face of social games throughout Asia, where millions of mobile users in emerging markets except China and Japan are now within reach.”. In a way it might be, especially for Indonesia where monetizing gateways are now dominated by telco companies, although there’s no clear explanation on how exactly Mig33 Merchant System will work in Indonesia.
So far, mig33 has over 24 million users based in Indonesia, that’s more than 50% of its total user. It just made total sense for mig33 to focus more on Indonesia as the mobile market growing significantly each year, and the social-nature of the market. Gaming is also huge in Indonesia, social games such as Zynga’s Cityville, Farmville, Poker are one of the most popular Facebook games in the country. Nevertheless, it’s going to be a major challenge for mig33 to steal this market from Facebook, it’s a long shot but always worth the try. Facebook isn’t doing anything in Indonesia anyway, should be easier for mig33 to understand the market, study it and hopefully steal some portion of the users.
