All about KakaoTalk (part two)

We finished the first part of the article about KakaoTalk on the KAKAO Game Platform. Let’s talk about it more specifically.   

KAKAO Game. Interesting figuresIn the year since its release last year, KAKAO Game has acquired a base of 30 million active gamers and more than 400 million downloads of games.

At the same time, the number of projects relative to the declared amount is quite small – about 180 games from 99 teams.

What is also important: of the 20 most popular games in Korea, 8 are published jointly with KAKAO. Only 25 million users play them daily (the population of the whole of South Korea is 50 million people).

We can say that Cocoa has captured almost all smartphone users in the country and turned them into fans of casual games. 

How is the profit divided?With each product published jointly with KAKAO, the developer receives 49% of all profits.

30% goes to the App Store or Google Play, and the messenger takes the remaining 21%. 

And yet: difficult, but possible

Kakao Game Platform is a closed platform. But this does not mean that it does not cooperate with foreign developers. At the end of July 2013, she announced new terms of entry to her platform: 

• the game should have already reached the top 20 in revenue or lasted at least 7 days in the top on the Apple App Store or Google Play Store;
• the following games can be released only if the first game receives an income of 100 million Korean won (about $ 90 thousand). 

Promotion in KAKAO

Promoting games in KAKAO is a rather complicated and time-consuming process. Due to cultural difficulties that directly affect the positioning and, accordingly, the perception of the game by local users, the chances of Western games to succeed are lower than those of projects native to the market. Moreover, 76% of Korean players consciously prefer “home” games when choosing a game. KAKAO has always been aware of this, preferring titles of “domestic production”. 

However, this year KAKAO still looked towards Western developers, and offered a number of tools to promote games.

Let’s look at them. First of all, these are viral marketing tools aimed at working with the mass user: SMM, PR, hidden marketing. 

KAKAO does not offer to purchase installations, as, for example, Mobage does, but it places each new game in the TOP 10 games in the second position to attract the primary user base. Moreover, by individual agreement, the Koreans are ready to place a banner for a period of one week above the recommended rating.  

Banner on the main page

The cost of placing a banner depends on the number of days for which you book it. The place must be booked in advance (1-2 months before the start of the advertising campaign).

Emoticons and stickers are the most effective promotion tools. This is a fairly expensive type of promotion, and yet, when entering the platform, be sure to put this item of expenditure in the marketing budget. The return on the disbursed budgets will be substantial. 

Emoticons

These are big personal “smiles” with the characters of your game. They are often used in correspondence. They have several functions at once: firstly, you can earn money on them (they cost money), secondly, they increase the recognition of your title, and thirdly, they lead to the page of your game. 

Do you want to get them? In this case, your game must match the graphic style of the service.

Just creating emoticons is not enough. We recommend, among other things, using paid pinning for a certain time, as well as the active use of SMM, PR, and hidden marketing tools provided directly by the Kakao platform

Stickers

If emoticons are used in chat, then stickers are “glued” in all KAKAO services. The problem is that COCOA dosed releases them “into life”. Accordingly, you need to book their release 3-4 months before the release.

For example, if you want to release stickers for the game right now, you will not succeed. We will have to wait at least until April 2014.

Viral Marketing Tools

So, what else can be done? KAKAO, in the form of related applications, offers a number of tools for promoting the game and working with the user.  Let’s look at them: 

1. Creating an image account and your community (group) is a rough analogue of FB + Twitter – Kakao Story, Kakao Page.
2. Socialization tools, including posting game statuses – KakaoTalk, Kakao Story, Kakao Link.
3. Sending messages with links – Kakao Link.
4. Blogs and guestblogs – Kakao Blogs, Kakao Story (mini-blogging).
5. Sales and distribution of promo codes, gift cards – Kakao Gifts.
6. Working with opinion leaders – KakaoTalk, Kakao Story. 

Constant communication with subscribers gives excellent results in the form of growth of such key indicators of success of each game as user retention, LTV, ARPU – all you need is to be constantly in touch with your user. KAKAO once again strongly reminds us of this.

This is all we wanted to tell you about KAKAO at the moment, we are ready to answer all questions a little lower – in the comments, as well as by mail. Write!