Problem
In the summer of 2012, GAMEON was one of the two companies that dominated Japan's mobile social gaming market. GAMEON was well known internationally for its profitability, particularly when compared with U.S. counterpart such as Zynga. In 2012, GAMEON's average revenues per user (ARPU) were estimated to be more than four times higher than Zynga's.
GAMEON's success in Japan had been built on three key pillars: 1) the sophistication of the company's data analytics tools, which allowed it to build engaging games and monetize them through in-game sales of digital goods; 2) the popularity of the development platform that GAMEON offered to third-party game developers: 3) effective mass-media advertising campaigns (e.g., TV commercials), combined with celebrity endorsements and partnerships with other commercially successful products. GAMEON began its international expansion in late 2010, intending to leverage the same three assets in order to achieve success in global markets. Early results were encouraging: in August 2012, GAMEON placed three games in the top 230 highest grossing games for Apple's US App Store.
If GAMEON is to pursue a platform strategy in the U.S. and other international markets, the company would be building a two-sided platform on top of other two-sided platforms -Apple's iOS and Google's Android. With this in mind, should GAMEON continue pushing its platform or should it focus on being a top mobile social game developer? For picking your choice of business model, please provide 3 reasons from the lectures and case discussions we had in this course. I will evaluate your answers based on the strength of your arguments, not on your choice.