A 3-Stage Transition Model of the Architecture of Mobile Social Games: Lessons from Mobile Social Games in Japan

Since the wide adoption of Open Social by SNS providers between late 2009 and middle 2010, the mobile business in Japan has quickly turned into the direction of item purchasing. This revenue-generating engine is so powerful that it has changed the landscape of mobile business and the game business in Japan. In less than 2 years, the market involving the item purchasing of mobile social games quickly reached the level of a billion US dollars. This gold-rush has facilitated the rapid evolution of mobile social games as massive numbers of users have gained and incorporated their collective mobile social experience. This has also leveraged the evolution of the architecture of mobile social games. The author proposes a three-stage evolutionary view of the architecture of mobile social games and presents its implications for mobile business engineering.