Alawar launches the game on LINE

The domestic company Alawar recently announced the imminent release of its Shake Spears game! as part of the Japanese social platform LINE.

If we do not confuse anything, the casual fighting game from the Novosibirsk team will be the first domestic project in the line of games of one of the most popular messengers of the Land of the Rising Sun.

In connection with the announcement, we took a short interview with Yulia Nabieva, head of sales and marketing of Alawar mobile games.

Julia Nabieva

Julia, was it difficult to negotiate with NHN?

We met with the NHN division, which deals with LINE, in May 2012 during the Casual Connect Singapore conference. And a few months later we signed a cooperation agreement and started working. It is not difficult to come to an agreement when you have good products, and the company occupies a strong position in the market, as it was in our case.

What have you changed in your project for the Japanese market?

Especially for LINE users, we will make a new version of the knightly hit Shake Spears!, in which the heroes will be … real samurai! This setting is more familiar to Asian players than the classic Western Middle Ages from the original Shake Spears! But we were happy to make such changes – in our opinion, such experiments are useful for the game. And a separate part of the project was the close integration of the game with the messenger and its functionality.

What are the expectations?

This is our first experience with messenger platforms, so it is difficult for us to talk about specific figures. We can only remind you that now LINE’s audience is more than 200 million users, and by the end of the year NHN plans to increase its reach to 300 million. Based on such rapid growth, we also expect a good growth dynamics in the number of Shake Spears players!

The release of the LINE version of the game for iOS is scheduled for the third quarter of 2013. Android users will have to wait for the project until the end of the year.

P.S.

Margarita Zabrodina, PR Manager of Alawar, also told us that NHN has started promoting LINE in Russia: “they buy airtime on TV and play cool commercials.”

Whether he will be able to overtake WhatsApp in popularity and whether the Telegram messenger from Durov, in which there are no games, will not compete with him seriously, we will most likely find out not earlier than next year.

Source: Alawar