The introduction of HTML5 support is aimed at the eastern, not the Western market, GREE Japan employees told our colleagues from PocketGamer.
Last week, GREE announced with fanfare the introduction of support for HTML5-based games into its platform. However, as James Nouch found out with PocketGamer, the company does not intend to actively promote this innovation in the Western market.
The fact is that HTML5 support was initially introduced with a view to Southeast Asia, where there is a significant demand for applications built on it. The latter is due to the widespread use of feature backgrounds. For GREE, which has a large number of Japanese HTML5 projects in its portfolio, this is an excellent sales market.
Moreover, the announcement of support for the new version of the markup language was timed to coincide with the conclusion of a partnership with the Singapore telecommunications company SingTel. According to the terms of the latter, all GREE games distributed on the SingTel network are now paid for by direct billing.
As for the Western market, here “native applications will remain a key component of our strategy,” GREE representatives said. They also noted, speaking about the not yet released English version of Dragon Collection, that they had to completely change the project for the Western market: “the only element that we left from the Japanese version is the design of the cards themselves.” This is a reason to think about the difference in mentality.