'Project Trident' to take CrowdStar mobile, global
Gaming company to take three-pronged expansion in online and mobile platforms, and global markets
CrowdStar announced Thursday its three-pronged business strategy, called "Project Trident," enabling the company to broaden its reach beyond social networks to mobile and global markets.
The strategy involves launching a given game franchise across multiple platforms and multiple regions at once. The three "prongs" are an online platform across 10 different social networks including Facebook, a mobile platform that includes smartphones and tablets, and a focus on global markets, including Korea, Japan, and China.
CrowdStar has already achieved success in the expansion of their "Girl" gaming franchise from Facebook to iOS, and this new strategy indicates a continuing push from the niche they have carved out on social networking sites to mobile, while still maintaining their current presence on social networking. It also indicates a focus on pushing into global markets.
The globilization of CrowdStar will entail eight different variations of its popular franchises, including 5 of the "Girl" franchise across 5 different Asian social networks in the fourth quarter of 2011 alone.
"Project Trident" was conceived in January of 2011, when CEO Peter Relan returned to the company and raised $23 million in capital from Time Warner.
The "Girl" games started with It Girl on Facebook and expanded to Top Girl on mobile applications. CrowdStar claims in a press release to have not just transferred a Facebook title to mobile but "chang[ed] the social graph interactions and game design to work for mobile game play" on iOS.
To clarify about these changes in social graph interactions, Vator News contacted a PR rep for CrowdStar Ken Johnston. "Moving a game from Facebook to mobile, you don't need to depend on Facebook users as the social graph," said Johnston.
CrowdStar cites these social graph changes as a direct contribution to Top Girl racking up 4 million downloads since its release four months ago. "Mobile revenues are expected to become half of the company's overall revenues this year," said the release.
It Girl has over 330k daily active users on Facebook, with 3.4 million monthly active users. The "Girl" franchises as a whole have 1 million daily and 8 million monthly active users across global Facebook and mobile.
Other games in CrowdStar's arsenal include Happy Pets, Mighty Pirates, Happy Island, Happy Aquarium, and Zoo Paradise. All these titles are available on Facebook. Crowdstar is still developing more games for Facebook and will release "a major game" for the social networking site this weekend.
At the HTML5 Dev Conference at the end of last month, CrowdStar CEO Peter Relan made the ambitious prediction that his company would create a game that would reach one billion people.
“We want to create the game that reaches a billion people,” said Relan at the conference. “We sense that web 3.0 is here. Mobile devices will get to six billion people. They will become pervasive. We will have the ability as app developers to build apps that, with a push of a button, could update the user experience of a billion people, just the way that Google does when it changes its search theme for Thanksgiving.”
