It's part of a drive by GREE to serve up region-specific content.
GREE is keen to tailor titles for social gamers in set territories studios in San Francisco and Vancouver the first fruits - rather than merely launching games from its Japanese base across the globe.
So what titles will GREE London serve up? Who better to take to task than GREE's UK CEO and senior VP of the firm's EML Business Department Ryotaro Shima.
Pocket Gamer: Why is London the best base for your European studio?
Ryotaro Shima: We had many reasons to open our studio in London.
There is of course the language factor and an ideal geographic situation allowing us to easily travel to and from Japan, US and every European country.
But our decision mainly relied on the fact that among all the other European countries, the UK is the one you can find many development studios and thus, many talented developers.
And we really want the talented ones to join us during the next few months!
How will its output differ to GREE's other fresh studios in San Francisco and Vancouver?
All our studio's over the world are composed of developers, artists and producers from the areas they are based.
It means we are creating through these studios games that are, of course, suitable to a global audience thanks to their gameplay, but that also have very strong opportunities to be successful in their local market.
GREE San Francisco's first release Zombie Jombie
Our London studio is not an exception to that rule - we are catching the essence of the European culture and will inject it into the titles coming from this new studio.
Moshi Monsters titles are a good example of this policy - we hope it will be greatly received in the UK as this IP is very strong here, but it will also appeal to the other countries where the brand is hugely famous around the world the US, Australia.
Basically, it should seduce every other audience thanks to the design and gameplay.
What challenges do you think the European market represents for GREE?
Europe is a mix of different cultures that have, for sure, strong common roots, but also many differences.
These differences are reflected in the degree of the penetration of free to play market in the different countries.
Our challenges will be to develop a free to play interest in the countries and develop games that will find their audience in the majority of them.
Rival DeNA appears to be enjoying much success in China with Mobage. Does it advances in Asia worry you?
We are not in a position to talk about other companies or make any comparisons but I can confirm that our presence in China is quite recent - our office there only opened last year.
We are currently initiating many successful relationships with Chinese developers and we have our in-house development studio getting bigger and stronger.
Alien Family, GREE San Francisco's second game
We are of course also discussing with external studios to have third party games published on our GREE Platform.
There's been a suggestion that some of GREE's Japanese games are failing to take off in the west, with the western-themed titles doing far better. How important are the western games you've managed to amass for the GREE platform?
We totally understand that some titles developed in Japan for a Japanese audience need changes to fit perfectly within the western market and we are currently reviewing this for many of these titles.
In parallel, we want to have games developed by western studios, designed to seduce western audiences.
This is why we acquired Funzio for example, but also why we are opening studios all over the world.
We want to make sure that we capture the interest of local markets and we are confident it will be one of the key's of our success outside Japan.
Thanks to Ryotaro for his time.
