This evening at the SCET office, over 50 students attended the Kabam Innovation Collider Kick-Off Event. Kabam creates, develops, and publishes games via Apple App Store, Google Play and the Amazon App store. The company has more than 850 employees worldwide and is headquartered in San Francisco. The Kabam team presented on the history of Kabam and described their upcoming challenge opportunity. They explained that the overall revenue in mobile gaming has been rapidly growing. The hobbit KoM, for example, was launched 2-3 years prior to Marvel CoC and its average gross ranking was higher buy Y1 revenue is only at 60% of Marvel CoC. The main problem they are facing is that most of Marvel’s revenue comes from Tier 1 countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Canada, Australia, Italy, Turkey, and Brazil. These countries take up about 76% in their gross revenue. Kabam understands that these markets are extremely profitable, but with profitability also comes severe competition. Marketing to these Tier 1 countries is becoming increasingly expensive and competitive.
The Kabam team dug further and asked the Kick-Off attendees, “What about countries like China, Japan, and Korea?” They all are geographically close to each other, but are socially very different. While looking at the most popular applications in each of the three countries, they found that none of the applications overlapped. China, Japan, and Korea all have different social interests and thus they differed in top applications.
The question the Kabam team asked for this case is which emerging countries have the most future potential. By analyzing barriers to entry, western influence, and marketing potential, teams will have to come up their top picks. This four-week collider project is an open challenge for Berkeley graduate and undergraduate students to develop and present a comprehensive market research and analysis report that predicts the next emerging market hot spot for iOS revenue over the next two year period. They must consider the following in their research:
-Smartphone penetration
-Cost of Marketing
-Disposable Income
-Adjacent Applicable expenditures
-Cultural background
-Power infrastructure
-Wi-Fi accessibility
If interested in applying for this collider project, please note the following dates:
Submission deadline: October 21st
Presentation: October 26th