Mobile chat community sees great response to mobile games

In August, mobile chat company mig33 launched a “premium” gaming service for its subscribers. It is now reporting a pretty impressive uptake in the number of people paying to play these mobile games. How did it go about it?

First of all, who is mig33?

mig33 is a mobile social network based almost entirely Instant Messaging. It does have a cheap SMS and call offering, but the heart of the service is in connecting people through IM. You can chat through the mig33 client, which also connects to the major social IM services - MSN, Yahoo, Facebook, GTalk and AIM - as well as supporting sending picture files.

Importantly, the mig33 client software is designed to run on any device. The majority of the 25 million currently registered on mig33 are feature phone users from outside the US.

What’s the news?

mig33 launched a premium games service, based on a virtual currency called migCredits. You buy your migCredits with real cash, and can use them to buy games or digital goods. The ubiquity of the mig33 platform meant that gamers on any mobile platform (and even on PC) from around the world were using the same currency to play the same games on the same platform. Gamers can compare scores and play against one another - both aspects of what is generally called “social gaming”.

Now mig33 is releasing data about how well the service has been received.

How has it done?

Very well, thank you. mig33 is reporting that it has had more than one million subscribers pay to play the premium games since it launched. This social gaming launch is part of the overall mig33 strategy of moving away from being “just” a mobile chat company, and towards being a full social entertainment service.

From the release:

Steven Goh, CEO and co-founder, mig33: “We are on a mission to become the Tencent QQ for the rest of the world, and our Social Gaming milestone is yet another step in our company’s march to achieving that goal. Without having to install a new client, our millions of users can immediately play games in any of mig33’s thousands of active chatrooms.”

Steve Boom, Executive Chairman, mig33: “Asia has seen some of the world’s fastest growth in terms of social and mobile networking. But even wildly successful incumbents like Tencent QQ and DeNA have remained landlocked in their respective regions.  mig33 is quickly growing to be the Mobile Social Entertainment Service of choice everywhere else.””

What we think?

There’s an interesting sort of behavior we’re starting to see among mobile networks these days - and I don’t mean the operators, I mean companies like mig33 and Nimbuzz who use the mobile channel to gather a community of chatters. Those communities now exist… and we’re seeing the creating companies trying to monetise them. You can’t just host a massive conversation for free forever - at some point you need your community to start paying for something.