By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry

LINE Pop Hits 20 Million Downloads, LINE Bubble At 10 Million

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Chat app LINE, which just crossed the 100 million user mark, continues to impress with amazing numbers for its LINE Game platform.

Operator NHN Japan today announced that tile-matching game LINE Pop hit a staggering 20 million downloads on January 16. The title was released worldwide on November 19 last year, meaning it took 58 days to reach that milestone.

NHN Japan also said today that LINE Bubble, essentially a clone of Taitos’s classic Puzzle Bobble (Bust a Move), racked up 10 million downloads between launch on December 22 last year and January 19 (or 28 days).

Depending on the country, LINE users can choose between up to 12 titles that are live on the app’s game platform at the moment. NHN Japan says that these titles combined were downloaded a total of 70 million times so far.

While the majority of LINE-powered games are popular, quite fun, make money and have elements like rankings or friend invites, the titles available right now on the platform aren’t really social. At this point, the app itself functions as a simple distribution portal or launcher to which NHN Japan is pushing content to.

The company’s official plan is to follow up on that first wave of “casual”/one-player games with multi-player titles (which NHN Japan has dubbed “party games” in a recent statement). At the final stage, NHN Japan hopes to have content that make full use of the social graph that LINE provides, games that can (or require to) be played together with other people.

About the author

Dr. Serkan Toto

I am the CEO & Founder of Kantan Games Inc., an independent consultancy focused on Japan’s game industry.

Please feel free to connect via Email (Serkan at kantangames.com), LinkedIn or Twitter.

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By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry