Cygames, the company behind the popular Mobage title Rage of Bahamut (see our review here), is announcing that the popular card battle game has surpassed two million users outside of Japan as of July 10, this since its February overseas debut.
The game has been performing well on the top grossing charts of both the Apple app store and the Google Play app store. As you can see below, it has done especially well on Google Play, holding the top grossing crown for 14 straight weeks. Social games expert Serkan Toto recently cited a Nikkei report that Rage for Android made $1.3 million in monthly sales during April, and could be making just as much on iOS [1].
Whether Japanese mobile social gaming companies (and indeed Japanese internet companies in general) can truly succeed abroad is an interesting drama to watch. Personally, I’m rooting for some Japanese company to produce an iconic Angry Birds-like game that can take the world by storm in the same way that the Mario or Final Fantasy franchises did.
But from a business perspective, seeing how these companies make money using a free-to-play model is an instructive case study for others who want to make it in the industry. While global consumers may not yet be as willing to part with their cash using a mobile device quite as willingly as Japanese people are, the trend is moving in that direction.
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Serkan noted a few days ago that it could be even more. ↩
