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Is Gree really spending money on user acquisition like there’s no tomorrow? (interview)

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 8 min

gree masuda

During the past six months, it wasn’t hard to find mobile game developers complaining about how Gree was driving up the cost of user acquisition. The company was reportedly using its profits from its ultralucrative mobile social gaming network in Japan to bankroll a campaign in the U.S. Here, it paid lots of money to draw new users to its free-to-play mobile games. Gree bought so much mobile advertising that it drove up the ad rates past the point where they made sense. If a game generated a lifetime value per user of $2, it made no sense to spend $5 or more acquiring each user.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

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.