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The DeanBeat: What Facebook’s $16B acquisition of WhatsApp says about the rise of Asian games

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 3 min

Facebook’s $16 billion acquisition of WhatsApp, the mobile messaging service, certainly said a lot about how much the social network needs to catch up in mobile. But it also pointed to a big hole in the West’s strategy to capture mobile gamers and its vulnerability to faster changes happening in the Asian games market.

Facebook had previously been trying to tackle the fast-growing messaging market with Facebook Messenger. But it had very low penetration in places in Asia. The WhatsApp deal won’t help Facebook much with Asian market share, but it might very well stop the Asians — Line, Kakao Talk, and WeChat, from taking over in the rest of the world.

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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.