akao Corp., the company behind Kakao Talk announced yesterday launching Kakao Game feature for the global market on both Android and iOS ecosystem. Kakao first launched the game platform which baked into its Kakao Talk in this July in Korea and recorded 82 million downloads in three months.
Kakao Game is the first profitable mobile messenger-based game platform worldwide. It provides users with downloadable mobile games. And since the platform was built on top of Kakao Talk, a quite popular mobile communicating tool with big user pool that could be leveraged on, it became a overnight hit in Korean market and toppped the game category of Korea’s google Play and App Store.
The platform, as of now, hosts 31 game titles and its revenue for the first three months after launch in July surpassed US$ 51.6 million. In October alone the revenue was US$ 35.3 million.
Kakao singled out three most sucessful casual games for its overseas reach, incuding Anipang, Tap Tap Blitz and Puzzle Zoo Zoo.
Kakao Talk believed that its game platform might be a gateway for success for smaller game developers in Korea that are confronting with difficulties in splashing money in marketing. Interestingly, Tencent’s Weixin also was rumored to launch a game platform soon. Tencent’s quarterly financial report revealed that the Chinese Internet giant invested US$63M into Kakao to acquire 13.54% of the company.
Kakao Game’s Monthly Revenue Growth Since Launch