Mogamo to pursue its passion

Set up eight years ago with the passion to develop its own mobile games, local software company Mobile Game Motion (Mogamo) is planning to expand its business capability from game-dealer to developer and owner of social games on the Android Platform. 

Mogamo managing director Ekkanit Chansawang said that this year the company plans to expand its business from only mobile-game dealing in the Thai market to mobile payments, mobile advertising and mobile social game service. The move is aimed at helping the firm have more sources of revenue and to tap the high potential for growth in mobile games, mobile applications, and mobile services. 

Ekkanit added that the rapidly increasing number of smart-phone users is opening up room for local software firms and making it easier to tap into this market. 

Mogamo sees huge opportunities in this growth market, hence the company this year plans to launch three new services. First is mobile payment under ‘Moga Pay’. This service offers mobile payment service with two models –micro-transaction payment involving small amounts up to Bt100, and cash card with payment values of Bt100, Bt300, Bt500, and Bt1,000. 

“We had a soft launch since early this year and we plan to officially launch this service in July [next year],” said Ekkanit.

Target-clients of this service include Android game apps, Internet services such as Web content, and multimedia services such as video-streaming services.

“They can use our payment service to offer in-app purchase,” said Ekkanit.

The second new service is mobile advertising, which is designed to serve as app advertising, called “Moga Deal”. In this service, Mogamo will work with mobile app service providers as partners to offer advertising along with the applications to reach end-users who use those applications. 

Currently, he said Mogamo has about four to five app partners who together have a total of 1 million end-users and banner impressions around 30 million times per day.

“This service is set to launch in August. We also plan to recruit more local advertisers to use our mobile adverting services. We have developed our own algorithm to offer advertisers the cost-per-installation model. We also plan to increase app partners to reach 20 to 30 app service providers, using our Moga Deal by the end of this year,” said Ekkanit.

The other new service is the mobile-social-game platform, which the company has developed and offered for half a year for feature phones. Currently, it has 40,000 members. It aims to have 100,000 members by the end of this year. 

“Mobile social games for the feature-phone market is still a huge market as most of the 80 million mobile-phone units are feature phones. In the near future, we will develop a mobile-social-game platform for smart phones when smart phones become a majority,” said Ekkanit.

He added that this year, Mogamo estimates revenue of between Bt50 million and Bt60 million, which comes from four services. Revenue from its existing service alone – mobile game dealer – will make up 60 per cent of this year’s total revenue, while 40 per cent will come from the three new services. The new services are expected to account for 70 per cent of total revenue by next year.

“Our passion is to have our own mobile game. We started this business with our own game but we had to stop as it did not work. Since then we have become a game dealer, selling games rather than developing our own games. Now, it is time to follow our passion. We have decided to develop and offer the mobile social game platform in August based on the freemium model,” said Ekkanit.

He added that this year, it will launch two mobile social games – ‘Super Star Manager’ scheduled to launch in August, and another one to be launched later.

He said the mobile platform is the emerging market for software developers. The market will grow rapidly through the next five years.