As part of Papaya Mobile’s global expansion strategy, it will push its Android gaming platform to China, its second largest market. They will be releasing SDKs and a Game Engine in Chinese. The company recently reached 8 million users, a figure that’s doubled since its launch last June, and the company is expecting good results in their China expansion this 2011.
As part of its strategy, Papaya Mobile will hold a Global Game Developer Contest encouraging the Android developer community to create games around their platform. Submission of entries starts today, and ends on February 16, 2011. The top 10 finalists will be notified on February 22, 2011 while the top 3 will be announced live at the GDC San Francisco 2011 on February 28, 2011. For more details, see here.
PapayaMobile raised $4 million last June to develop its Android gaming platform but this is an early move for a large scale developer to take its cross-promotional game platform on an international scale. China in particular is a huge area of growth for this type of mobile gaming, with large opportunities in the virtual goods arena as well.
There is a growing influence of games as cross-promotional marketing tools. To demonstrate the growing influence of gaming platforms at this level, in-app purchases are showing higher returns than advertisements in some cases. Game developer Scoreloop take its lead on the Android while Zynga, another game developer is taking an international approach even though it doesn’t have the developer and marketing tools of PapayaMobile network, and launched a localized version of Chinese version Zynga Poker. PapayaMobile also acquired Conduit.
