Japanese social gaming giant GREE is buying up Western studios, assembling teams in San Francisco, Vancouver and London, and now it is also establishing partnerships with indie developers.
More specifically, GREE announced the conclusion of digital distribution agreements with the following teams: Enders Fund, Fathom Interactive, Fifth Column and FreezeTag. The goal of the Japanese is quite clear: to provide their own social gaming platform with new content. It is not entirely clear, however, what caused such a strange choice: the projects of the presented teams, to put it mildly, lack stars from the sky. Moreover, Fifth Column, unlike other teams, did not even announce a project for the GREE network.
Eros Resmini, GREE’s vice president of marketing, comments on the new agreements as if to justify them: “We know that every team is special. Some need technology, others need our expertise – and we are happy to help in any way we can.”
It sounds as if the Japanese are either going to raise new masters from Indian developers, or have concluded agreements, only based on the fact that the more content, the better.
At the moment, GREE is forced to work with Western developers only because Japanese titles in the Western market do not meet with a response. At the same time, the company is striving to reduce its dependence on its home market, which still brings it more than 90% of all profits.