Top Japanese Social Devs Make $1,000,000 Per Month | Hacker News Reader

Top Japanese Social Devs Make $1,000,000 Per Month

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29 pointsthiele8 comments

I think the headline is very misleading, it's (of course) about how much revenue each developer is generating for the business, not how much they're making (as a salary).

Perhaps obvious to native speakers of English, but it got me to click the link since it sounded Too Good To Be True.

I had the exact same thought. "Makes 1m/mo" != "Generates 1m/mo of revenue for the company."

The ARPU for mobage town is higher because these games are just for Japanese mobile phones (using flash lite). Because Japanese phones have integrated billing (you buy something and it shows up on your phone bill), and Japanese are used to paying for content, it is much easier to get users to buy something vs. the credit card payment. I've heard the mobile has about 10x the conversion rate of credit card.

The other thing is these are companies that are producing these games, not individuals. So the top developers are putting a lot of money into the games as well.

Finally, with Zynga having an estimated revenue of 50 million dollars per month, a million dollars per month sounds like a drop in the bucket.

Given the revenues for a startup in an adjacent space at the tech incubator I used to work at 3 years ago, I would be flabbergasted if the headline was literally accurate. As you can probably guess, I am not at liberty to disclose specifics. But let me repeat: flabbergasted. Like I would be if someone ballparked search at below a billion bucks a year.

The number is from a press release, so unless there was a mistake in it, I don't see why they would intentionally under-quote it, as they want to encourage developers to use their platform.

Also note this is just for 3rd party developers at Mobage. Mobage's focus has been more on its own titles then other 3rd parties.

Mixi and Gree are Japanese SNS that support 3rd party apps. In particular, third party developers have been having a lot of success with Mixi.

So yeah, there is lots more money to be made in SNS applications in Japan, but this article was just on Mobage.

I think we're in total agreement. My read of your original comment was "Hmm, a million a month, that's nothing." I wanted to point out "There are mobile/social developers in Japan who make substantially more than that.", which is not obvious from the submission's title. (You know that, I expect, since you've forgotten more about Japanese mobiles than I know, but it might not be obvious to the mean HNer.)

zen zen wakaranai...

And they're probably paid $30,000 a year!

Well maybe not these particular guys, but a typical Japanese software developer's salary is shockingly low.

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