This came on my radar only recently, but there is a Korean mobile game and social network service called "Mugeta", that has copied Japan's popular Mobage service (short for "Mobagetown", or "Mobile Game Town") down to the name itself: "Mugeta" in Korean is short for "Muryo (free) Game Town".
Photo from ETNews.co.kr
The service is provided by Entaz, a mobile content service provider, through KTF (Korea's #2 carrier). Mugeta began service in April this year, and reached 0.2 million subscribers mark in just four months. To put this in perspective, Mobagetown of Japan has been around since February 2006 and today has 9 million subscribers. So at least in terms of growth, Mugeta is pretty impressive.
Mugeta is free - users get mobile games (there are 58 game titles available now), avatars, mobile homepage (called "phone-py", perhaps after the minihompy), all for free. Mobagetown also used its free content to build up the initial user-base, and when they amassed a big user base, monetization followed.
KTF says over 70% of Mugeta service users are teens (under 20), and female users take up 43%, which is pretty high compared to other mobile content services.
Well, in this age of globalization, a best practices in one country can get copied very quickly in other countries. People may quickly point their fingers to China, as that's an easy one to spot, but StudiVZ shows that Germans know how to copy, too. That said, I seriously wonder if Mugeta has partnered up with DeNA (the provider of Mobagetown) or is paying them royalty. Otherwise, I would be very uncomfortable.
