In 2012, GREE Inc. was among the world's most lucrative mobile social gaming companies. Its success in Japan was due both to the in-house games and also to the development platform it provided to third-party game designers. Its greatest challenge ended up being to replicate the prosperity of this two-pronged strategy in marketplaces around the globe, where it needed to contend not only with lots of other game developers (e.g. Zynga), but additionally using the mobile platform companies themselves (e.g. Apple's iOS and Google's Android).
Authors: Andrei Hagiu, Masahiro Kotosaka
Publisher: Harvard Business School (713447-PDF-ENG)
Publication: Nov 19, 2012 (Revision: Jun 10, 2013)
Case questions and answers:
Please conduct a full SWOT analysis for Gree Inc.
Case analysis for Gree Inc.
Problem Statement
GREE Inc. has been a successful Japanese company ever since it was first launched as a social networking company in 2004. In early 2007, Naoki Aoyagi, joined GREE Inc. after working as an investment banker for four years at Deutsche bank. He established strategic alliances in Japan’s technology sector for the company in order to transform the firm into a more profitable business venture. As competition increased from other Japanese operators, GREE Inc.’s revenues fell shorter than it expected and it quickly had to change its business model. Naoki Aoyagi and the management team found an opportunity in the market for developing free mobile games as a means of generating traffic and advertising revenues. Now the company has became one of the top platforms in the mobile gaming industry and are producers of popular in-house games on large third party platforms such as Apple’s App Store, Google Play and Amazon. As competition in the social gaming market increases, GREE Inc. faces challenges in more complex international markets as well as from the major competitive mobile gaming platforms. In addition to political regulation and