Hot on the heels of DeNA’s tie-up with Alibaba Cloud Computing earlier today that will further its expansion in China, rival gaming giant GREE just announced that they are partnering with Paypal, a big move that’s sure to help facilitate payments as it grows globally.
According to their statement, GREE and Paypal’s partnership will “facilitate GREE’s global expansion … to over 103 million active Paypal accounts” worldwide. Likewise for the 150 million GREE gamers, Paypal will become a payment option which they can use to buy GREE coins or make in-game purchases. Paypal payments are available for Japanese smartphones starting today, and it will be ‘gradually introduced’ in North American and other regions moving forward.
GREE CEO Yoshikasu Tanaka sees this as another positive step on his company’s quest to reach a billion users:
We are expecting to accelerate our global plans through this business
alliance with PayPal as it is used by millions of global users as a safer, faster way to pay on mobile devices.
A week ago, GREE also began distributing pre-paid cards in convenience stores, making yet another payment option available to Japanese consumers. Clearly, GREE doesn’t want any obstacle remaining between them and the user’s money, and so far they’re doing a pretty good job of lubricating the payment process.
To that end, GREE also announced that it is conducting a month-long campaign starting on January 11th that will see them give away 10,000 coins to 200 lucky users who buy coins with Paypal.
