The promise of the East

Gamevil, a Korean publisher, has grown its revenues through the sale of virtual goods. In fact, its games series such as RPG Zenonia and Baseball Superstars have always made the majority of profit this way. Gamevil is building out its online platform and releasing high-end freemium games. It has a simple objective; capture large market share with freemium games and then draw in revenue by asking subscribers to pay to upgrade at a later date.

Of course, these business models are being adopted closer to home and have already gained a lot of traction. However, the traditional paid for business model isn’t waning. Gameloft, for example, saw a 15 per cent rise for Q3 2010 sales and it relies heavily on paid for sales.

But perhaps as sign of the times, EA, Western Europe’s largest games publisher, snapped up Chillingo for $20 million in late 2010. Chillingo tends to publish its games through app stores, and EA clearly recognised the value of the strongly growing app store channel.

On a related note, developers around the world are experimenting with different platforms and despite the success of proprietary platforms to date, there is still a lot of fluidity in the market and change to come.

App stores are going to be one of the major sales channels in the coming years. And those that offer cross-platform apps are going to be among the most popular. Given the proliferation of hardware devices end-users are increasingly expecting apps that can be used on any hardware platform. It’s not an unreasonable expectation.

This demand is going to gather pace as we move towards the Internet of things in which countless devices will access the Internet with all the ease of turning on a tap.

Of course, creating multi-platform ‘hybrid’ apps is difficult but it can be done with HTML5 and Javascript as one option. At softtalkmobile we wouldn’t be too surprised if the first surge of multi-platform apps comes out of the East. 

APAC is a thriving fecund market with lots of hungry developers. Bangalore, in India, for example, is literally surrounded by thousands of colleges teaching software software development. Once the opportunities are clearly obvious, such as those offered by the Intel AppUp developer program, and the market starts baying the East will start biting.

To find out more about the Intel AppUp developer program simply click here

* This blog post is written by Softtalkmobile, and is sponsored by the Intel AppUp developer program, a single channel for distributing apps to multiple devices, multiple operating systems, and multiple app stores.