CrowdStar Makes First Move On Japanese Mobile Gaming Market

The battle for Japan is waging on and Crowdstar today unveiled its plan on how it will be tackling the Japanese market. Today, Crowdstar is launching Happy Aquarium and Happy Island on Yahoo! Mobage in Japan and is planning the launch of several new titles on Facebook through the end of this year. More after the jump. According to the release, Crowdstar has started testing two of its new games that are currently in beta. One is an RPG game for women called 'CrowdStar's It Girl' and a matching game called 'Pop Boom' that's taking on more of a bejeweled blitz model as it lets players play for 60 second periods. Crowdstar is also planning the release of many mobile titles through some of the partnerships its incubator YouWeb has secured. "CrowdStar is an exciting center of social gaming where talented people can really shine," said Pete Hawley, Vice President of Production. Hawley is a 20-year games-industry veteran, and former vice president at Electronic Arts, who led EA's internal Social Gaming efforts. "If you want to be recognized for your efforts as a key member of a social game development team, you have to be at CrowdStar." Crowdstar has been aggressively scaling their efforts and have solid infrastructure and management in place to increase production capacity and drive new merchandising programs. Crowdstar will need this scale and creative talent as it takes on the Zynga-SoftBank duo expansion in the Japanese market. We covered Crowdstar's announcement of taking Drecom on as a publishing partner near the end of August and its good to see these efforts pay off as Happy Aquarium and Happy Island could also be launching on Mixi, Gree and Hangame soon. Some more stats: Japan's major PC platforms. * two hit games beta-launched in last few weeks already been played more than 12 million times by millions around the world User stats * just about to pass 100 people -- CrowdStar has the highest MAU per employee in the industry * never taken funding compared to competitors * has vaulted to No. 2 position (by MAU) behind Zynga YouWeb, the technology incubator and parent to Crowdstar, has also recently been working on a product called iSwifter, a service that streams Flash content to the iPad through the cloud. YouWeb's goals for iSwifter are to position it into the market early by building a technology bridge between popular Flash game content and iPad owners. This can also spell new opportunities for Crowdstar to expand its games on to the popular tablet device. We'll be watching this space closely to see how others like Zynga and DeNA vie for market share in this epic battle for the golden island of Japan. For now, if you're smart, motivated and passionate about games and technology, Crowdstar is looking to hire those who want to play a critical role in shaping the future of social games. Contact them at jobs@crowdstar.com.

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CrowdStar Makes First Move On Japanese Mobile Gaming Market

Azam Khan

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