LINE made some notable announcements at a big press conference recently, but since a lot of people might not really know who they are, let me give some background about both them and the industry position they've taken over.
Back in the feature phone days, two companies dominated the mobile charts due to their incredibly strong distribution platforms. These companies were DeNA (who distributes games under the Mobage name) and GREE.
DeNA would partner with external companies to have them develop games for their platform using a combination of the publisher's IPs and the game framework/monetization strategy from DeNA.
GREE on the other hand would essentially license your IP and make your game for you with their internal staff.
The games they made were incredibly similar in nature to those of DeNA, so the practical difference was what business model you preferred. Almost every publisher took part in this as all these games were making so much money.
These games continued to have success into the smartphone era until around 2012 when they started to decline when more sophisticated, better performing (DeNA/GREE games were run through a mobile web browser) titles like Puzzle & Dragons started taking off. GREE and DeNA still have some hits, but their position is notably diminished and they have fewer partnerships than they used too, especially as mobile has become more important to the publishers they partnered with.
However, notably, another platform has also risen in their place in the smartphone world. LINE is a popular social networking service that has 50 million users in Japan and 300 million in total. Think of it sort of like a Facebook-esque type of thing (though more focused on instant communication) for smartphones, primarily popular in Asia.
It was actually originally created quite recently as a response to the Tōhoku earthquake in 2011 when land based telecommunication systems were damaged and NHN Japan's employees needed an internet based way to communicate, and ended up taking off dramatically after it was released to the public due to its quality.
Around 2013 LINE started distributing games through their service and created LINE Corporation (a subsidiary) to handle making and distributing games. Much like on Facebook, these games became astronomically popular due to the popularity of the underlying service. These titles were also generally of high production values and are more interactive than what Facebook games were like when they came out by virtue of being on a smartphone. LINE's titles tend to dominate the high end of the top grossing charts as viewable here:
http://www.appannie.com/apps/ios/top/japan/overall/?device=iphone
Now LINE is increasingly getting into the same partnership business that Mobage and GREE were renowned for. They've set up new jointly owned subsidiaries with both CyberAgent and GREE itself that will make games distributed through the LINE platform, along with starting an angel investment arm that is investing in smaller studios to generate more content for their platform. This is in addition to their internal development studios that are already producing a notable amount of content.
They've also partnered with media publishers to ramp up their efforts in bringing their transmedia efforts outside of Japan, which they handle internally in the domestic market, along with a variety of other non-gaming related ambitions to help keep their platform incredibly relevant.
There is a full overview press release
here and their general new page with the individual announcements press releases is
here.
As for how they've been doing, they've been continuing to experience explosive revenue growth.
Overall, I just wanted to give a look at what is likely to be an increasingly potent force in Japanese gaming, in case they come up significantly more in the future.
