GREE Invests in China’s UltiZen Games

GREE, Japan’s leading mobile social gaming platform, announced today that it plans to invest in UltiZen Games, a Chinese PC, mobile, and browser-based game developer that also provides art outsourcing services for a variety of gaming platforms. GREE will buy shares equivalent to 5.1 percent of voting rights in the Chinese company.

GREE’s investment may best be understood in the broader context of its attempts at global expansion. A partnership with UltiZen gives it a window into the Chinese gaming market (on top of its alliance with Tencent), and UltiZen’s art outsourcing services could be beneficial to GREE and its partners all over the world.

As a developer, UltiZen focuses primarily on social and casual games, which fits well with GREE’s focus as a social gaming platform, but the UltiZen is also developing two separateMMOs. Those titles and UltiZen’s proprietary multiplayer technology in general might also offer GREE significant benefits as it seeks to expand into new markets.

Ultizen’s CEO, Lan Haiwen, remarked that “the alliance opens an over 100 million user-based mobile social network for UltiZen to develop creative and interesting smartphone contents for.”

As for GREE, it was just last week that it announced it had surpassed 130 million users worldwide, although that’s for ‘GREE Group’ which includes Open Feint numbers too (see chart below). However you slice it the numbers are staggering. And astonishingly, CEOYoshikazu Takana has his sights set on reaching Facebook-like user figures. At his current pace, he might just do that.