Gree: Top mobile devs earning 4x more than a year ago

Gree's SVP of studio operations claims that the most lucrative mobile games are now earning as much as four times as they would have a year ago.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Anil Dharni pointed to the proliferation of the iPad as the catalyst for the huge growth of mobile gaming in the last two years.

"It's 4X and beyond in terms of revenue [compared to a year ago]," he said. This is supported by the revenue of top developers like Super Cell, which can earn as much as $500,000 per day from games with relatively low overheads.

Dharni also predicted that Android would "grow faster this year," and start to close the gap on iOS.

Dharni joined Gree when it acquired Funzio, a company he co-founded, for $210 million last year. He now works out of the company's San Francisco offices, which are almost entirely dedicated to the creation of first-party games.

While Gree's recent acquisitions - it also bought OpenFeint for $104 million - were part of a strategy to expand into North America and Europe, Dharni claims that the company's experience in Japan has been a great help in building successful products.

"While we had been running live games, we weren't running them at the depth at GREE was," he added. "What that means is creating new fun and engaging content on a daily or weekly basis. You want your players coming back every week to check what's new. We conceptually understood this, but didn't see the extent to which it improves our metrics."