The mobile game industry in Indonesia is growing rapidly due to a young population and rising smartphone adoption. However, feature phones still account for 80% of the mobile market. Key points:
- The mobile game market is relatively immature compared to other Southeast Asian countries like Vietnam.
- Android dominates the smartphone market and platform, but Google Play does not support local developers' monetization.
- Top grossing mobile games are mostly from foreign publishers like Line, while local developers struggle without proper payment and distribution channels.
- Casual and strategy games are popular genres in Indonesia. There is room for more game diversity and innovation.
- Partnering with telcos is important for distribution and payments
2. Overview Market
• Indonesia is “Asia’s Next Big Opportunity” high growth rate
and young population (average age is 25)
• Feature phone still accounts for 80% of mobile phone users(Nokia commands
the biggest share with around 40 million mobile internet users (potential
feature phone gamers)
• Internet-capable feature phones remain an incredibly
popular means of getting online
• Internet usage in Indonesia is still in the early phase with the dominance of
social network and messaging.There is many potential for gaming
Source: TechinAsia
3. Indonesia Smartphone Phone Market
Smartphone users
Smartphone share
For mobile phone vendors:
• Samsung is the smart phone market leader
• Apple's market share is tiny
For platform:
• Android is the dominance platform with roughly 60%
Smartphone
ownership
rise to 24%
Mobile phone
reach 84% of
population
Smartphone users
will reach over 100
million in 2017
(Android dominance)
èFeature phone will
still be present
Source: IDC, eMarketer
4. Indonesia Game Industry Overview
Client Based Web based Mobile game
8-10 million players
ARPPU ranges from $3-$12
Around 20 players
Market sizes ~ 95 million
Approximately 12 million players
ARPPU ranges from $0.5 to $2
Dominated with Facebook Games,
especially Zynga
Poker is the most popular
Market size ~ 24 million
• The game industry is still very new (immature)
• The market is less than that ofVietnam
• No exact data about the industry (no proper research have been conducted)
Most player is local content
provider act as publisher
ARPU ranges from $0.2-$0.8
Average lifetime revenue of
good games is around $8000
Source: Collected
5. Indonesia Mobile Game Players
Local Content Providers Foreign publishers
• Most LC Providers are indie developers (~20 employees)
6. Mobile Payment Ecosystem
• PayPal users and credit card holders are rare.
• 60 million bank customer &16 million credit cards
holder (compare to ~240 million population)
• Not a popular payment method, users want linear/
easy method
Online
payment
Direct
carrier billing
• SNS, carrier credit, etc.
• Telcos demand huge shares for transactions (~60%)
• Common credit balance around $0.5-$1. Most
credit top-up is $1
• Most common payment method as of now
7. Platform Distribution
OTT
Local Content Distributors
Traditional Appstore
• Limited iOS users in Indonesia
• Google Apps does not yet support Android developers in Indonesia
who wish to monetize their apps through direct sales or in-app
purchases.
• The only way to make money from an Android app in Indonesia is to
integrate advertising into the app
• Gameloft appstore partners with telcos to let user purchases apps/
items
• JalanTikus: biggest appstore startup. 1 million monthly
active users.
• Speedup, Smartfen: exclusive for specific smartphone
and tablet devices.
• TemanDev: created by largest teco,Telkomsei. Helped
local startup to market products.
• Market share between LINE, Kakao Talk,Whatsapp and Wechat.
• However, LINE is the the dominance platform distribution.
• Kakao Talk just brought its social gaming platform to Indonesia in May
8. Feature Phone Platform Distribution
• 6-10 million users
• Social gaming network: gaming, friends, interaction
• Easy integration using HTML
• Wide distribution (reach users of top
telcos in SEA
• Effective Monetization (monetize with SMS
billing
• Funded by Singtel & Softbank
• 65 million users globally (35 million in Indonesia)
• Social gaming network: gaming, friends, interaction (stronger social
interaction compare to Kotagames)
• Partner with major telcos such as Telkomsel & major handset
brands in Indonesia
• Also launched on Google’s Android to answer to the growing market
needs
Source: Companies website, collected
9. Indonesia Top Game Apps
• Top grossing apps are dominated by foreign players.
• Top publishers are consistent across different
platform as US and Japan is main players
• LINE has a really strong presence in Indonesia both
as an OTT and a mobile gaming platform
• The poor performance of local developers are
mainly due to the fact that Google Play doesn’t
support local developers to sell premium games
and in-app purchases, while a majority of
developers as well as players are from Android
platform
Source: Appannie
10. Indonesia Gaming Composition
• Casual games and Strategy games are very popular
in Indonesia
• Strategy games with western storyline is doing very
well and looks similar with each other
• Card battle gains decent attention from players but
could better compare to gaming trends in Asia
• There are definitely a lot of room for innovation and
diversification of gamers
Source: Appannie, collected
11. Challenges in the market
There is still no solid payment channel system to monetize
Low Infrastructure, there is a big gap between big cities and smaller cities
Big market population, but low ARPU
Feature phones popularity come with limitations: can’t handle heavy
animated artwork
12. How to tap in the market?
Recipe for Great Feature Phone
Games
Source: TMG
13. How to tap in the market?
Highly recommend developing partnership with telcos
• Telcos serve the biggest paying service for first time internet mobile users
• Telco, such as Telkomsel, has their own Appstore to promote games & apps. It’s the easiest way to distribute
products to a large pool of customers.
Aggressively engage in the mobile feature phone market
• It’s not about who has the money, but who is willing to pay.
With feature phone users, they have less money to spend, but
they are more willing to spend
• Feature phone users are accustomed of paying for content
(different with smartphone cultural where everything is free
on the internet)
• It is simply targeting a very large pool of potential users (80%
of mobile users)
• In three to five years, Android will start to take over
TMG, a mobile social game providers for
feature phone in Indonesia shows higher
revenue potential compared to US giants Zynga
Source: TMG
14. How to tap in the market?
Localize our best products into Indonesia market
• MC Corp has a very strong portfolio of strategy and RPG games and should localize it to
the Indonesia market
• Indonesia mobile game market does not just lack RPG games, but also lack games with story
line from Asia/China