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Comment by minikomi | Hacker News Reader

This is, essentially, the position of LINE in japan. Started as a funky messaging app with stickers, became a host for many pay to play games & fortune telling etc.

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The fundamental question here is whether the success of LINE and on a similar note, Kakao, can translate to other markets. We've already seen that WhatsApp and other messengers were much less popular in the US due to the ubiquity of free messaging. I wonder if there are other economic and possibly cultural factors that enabled those apps to succeed in their home markets but may be barriers in other places.

A good point, and LINE also reports around 50% of their revenue coming from in-game purchases, hinting at what the author sees in Kik's future. It will be interesting to see if Kik can replicate LINE's Japan successes in North America.

The thing about LINE (and kakaotalk, etc), though, is that they do a pretty good job of keeping the focus sharply on the essential messaging/voip functionality, while still making it very easy to do the "other stuff." You can install LINE and very quickly start chatting with existing friends from your phone address-book, and if you don't want to play games or whatever, their existence doesn't get in your way.

In this sense, LINE etc aren't so much like FB or other "giant ball of mud" social apps, and present a much bigger threat to whatsapp.

But it can also be that in-game purchases and stickers and other things are only successful value propositions for a given demographic.

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