Viber has followed in the footsteps of its rival mobile messaging platforms Line and KakaoTalk to venture into the games business.
Viber Games launched in Belarus, Malaysia, Singapore, the Ukraine and Israel recently, with a staggered global rollout to follow in the coming months. All of the games available at launch were created by third-party development partners.
“This major expansion of our platform gives people another completely new way to connect with Viber,” said Viber CEO Talmon Marco in a statement. “It’s an important step for us and we are looking forward to the response from our users.”
Specifically, those games are Storm8’s Viber Candy Mania and Viber Pop, and Playtika’s Wild Luck Casino. Viber didn’t name any other studios involved in future games, but it did suggest that the Viber brand and characters from the Viber Sticker Market would feature prominently.
They also will be free-to-play, which, if the performance of games on services like Line is any indication, could prove to be very lucrative for Viber. The company had more than 100 million monthly active-users at the start of the year.