Japanese social gaming giant GREE is continuing their US expansion plans, by making a move into a new San Francisco office. Located in the China Basin neighborhood of San Francisco, this 41,000 square foot office will not just be home to US GREE operations, as they plan on launching their global platform by the 4th quarter of 2012, but it will also house a game development studio that will develop original content for GREE. This office will be opening up this Spring.

The GREE internal studio is headed up by Eiji Araki, who has worked on social and free-to-play games in Japan for the past six years. His titles have included Clinoppe, a game where players raise a dancing yellow creature and Haconiwa, a game where players grow planets and place decorations in a private garden. These games claim over 10 million players in Japan, and are coming to the US later this year.

The US studio is already up and running, and they are planning to release their first two titles in March. According to Eiji Araki, “Our team is hard at work to deliver best-in-class content. Our aim is to constantly change the face of mobile social gaming and we know, without a doubt, that San Francisco is THE city to find the top talent to build unique games from the ground up for the Western Market.” The studio will be expanding over the next few months as they roll out more in-house titles while they also continue expanding their third-party developer relations, with plans to begin rolling out the GREE Platform and titles utilizing it. Some of the first publishers releasing titles on the GREE Platform will include Namco Bandai, Capcom, Square Enix/Taito, Sega, and Tecmo Koei.

These are all part of GREE’s goal to expand to a goal of one billion users from their current 190 million registered users by planning to double their US staff, and expanding with new offices globally. They recorded over $1 billion in profit, and as such, may just have the resources to make this a reality.

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