CrowdStar Expands Globally and on Mobile as It Girl Goes to Asia
It Girl developer Crowdstar announced a plan for global growth today titled “Project Trident” that will spread the company’s top Facebook and mobile game franchises to international networks.
Like many top developers, the goal is to be diversified across multiple platforms so that policy changes on any single one can’t jeopardize the whole of the business. Zynga is taking a similar approach in strengthening its direct-to-consumer gaming network ZLive.
The first part of Crowdstar’s project is It Girl and Top Girl’s migration to Asia via South Korean games portal operator NHN. The “Girl” franchise will start out in Japan on NHN’s affiliate there before in theory migrating to South Korea and China. NHN’s largest games portal, Hangame, claims to be the largest in South Korea with 24 million registered uses and 240,000 concurrent users at its peak traffic.
Meanwhile on Facebook and mobile in Western markets, Crowdstar is preparing to augment its games library with eight new game launches before the end of the fourth quarter — one of which is due to launch this weekend. Currently, the “Girl” franchise is Crowdstar’s leader at 3.3 million monthly active users and 280,000 daily active users on Facebook and over 4 million downloads of the mobile game. The developer says it expects its mobile revenues to account for half the company’s overall revenue this year.
According to the press release announcing Project Trident, the Girl franchise enjoys close to 8 million monthly active users and 1 million daily active users across Facebook, mobile, and global. For the Facebook part, It Girl has been in decline for the past two to three months in terms of monthly and daily active users — reflecting an almost 47 percent drop in DAU for the past 30 days alone. As for monthly active users, it was already in a gradual decline before Facebook changed its accounting practices for active users on October 14.
The iOS part of the franchise, called Top Girl, has also been declining although it maintains a top 50 grossing ranking on the platform.
December 20th, 2011 at 2:37 pm
[...] a sign of the times as many of Facebook’s leading game developers have had to migrate toward more promising fronts on Android and iOS as growth for social games has s…. Crowdstar, Zynga, Funzio and Booyah have probably had the most noticeable crossover success this [...]