As it approaches a year old, South Korea’s Kakao game platform has become a mobile game juggernaut with 30 million users. The platform is part of the 100-million-user strong Kakao Talk mobile-messaging network, which is replacing text messaging.
Kakao games growth
The numbers associated with the platform’s fast growth are astounding. It has had more than 300 million accumulated subscriptions and more than 400 million downloads. Kakao Talk was launched in 2010, but it really took off after the game service started on July 30, 2012, with 10 titles from seven partners. Now there are 180 titles from 99 developers. Overall sales grew 194 percent from 118 billion Korean won achieved in the second half of 2012 to 348 billion in the first half of 2013.
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Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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