GREE
Platform · this deep dive is built from the official pages of the platform itself and of the tools that support it.
Overview
GREE (グリー, Gurī) is a Japanese social network that grew out of a personal project and turned into a gaming platform. The company also explains the name: GREE is named after the "Six De"gree"s of Separation" hypothesis — six handshakes. Founder Yoshikazu Tanaka put the alpha version online as a personal site in February 2004, and in December of the same year set up a company to run the service.
Today GREE is a set of features inside a single app. The terms of use list what it contains: games, a diary, communities, a message board, chat, a messenger, friend requests, an app portal and other social network features. When we checked, the desktop version at gree.jp was a stub with a QR code and a request to enter the address games.gree.net or search for "GREE" in the app store — the service is mobile.
The main thing a communications specialist needs to know is best said up front: GREE prohibits commercial activity by users almost entirely. The breakdown of that ban is in the section on rules.
Who's here
Geography is fixed strictly by the terms: 「本サービスは、日本国内においてのみ 利用することができるものとします」 — the service may be used only within Japan, and the company accepts no liability for damage arising from use outside it. The language is Japanese.
Corporate reporting gives an indirect sense of scale. The group reports 1,520 employees across the group as of the end of March 2026. The company announced its results for the year ended June 2025 on 6 August 2025; the industry outlet gamebiz reports them as follows: revenue 57,111 million yen, operating profit 4,860 million yen, net profit 1,194 million yen; the games segment — 36,936 million yen of revenue, the metaverse — 8,276 million yen, IP — 1,737 million yen, DX — 7,041 million yen. This is an outlet's retelling, not a primary document.
One more measure of the platform's own scale is the outcome of an anniversary campaign: the twentieth anniversary page reports 3,968 stories submitted. That is the number of participants in a single campaign, not the service's audience.
Getting started
Registration is mandatory for anything involving communication: users who want to use the basic features — the diary, communities, the message board, chat, the messenger and friend requests — are required to register.
There are three ways to do it: entering an email address and other details; guest registration without entering an email; linking to a third-party provider's service designated by the company. With guest or third-party registration, some features in certain apps may be unavailable.
The account requirements explicitly rule out several scenarios that are routine in platform work:
- One person, one account; apart from guest mode, holding several accounts and registering on behalf of a third party are prohibited.
- At registration you must give an accurate date of birth and place of residence; giving the company false information about your IP address, including via a VPN, is prohibited.
- A username will not be issued if it is already taken, could be read as an attempt to impersonate someone, belongs to another person, makes the user personally identifiable, infringes someone else's rights or is liable to cause offence.
The terms describe no separate business account or brand page. The only form of collective presence mentioned is the community (コミュニティ, komyuniti): a board for exchanging opinions on a particular topic, created and run by a user; the community manager is obliged to monitor the content posted in it and bears the same responsibility for it as the person who posted it.
What you can publish
You may publish only what you hold the rights to: you may post and edit only text, images and video for which the user holds the necessary intellectual property rights or has obtained the rights holder's permission.
Rights to what you upload stay with you — with a substantial caveat: the user retains copyright and other rights to their content, but the company may use it to the extent necessary to provide the service, processing it as it sees fit, on its own sites and on partners' sites; the user undertakes not to exercise the author's moral rights in respect of such use.
The company reserves the right to read what you write: to review posts, messages and chats — whether or not they are open to other users — to the extent necessary to provide the service and check compliance with the rules, and to delete them without prior notice.
What is prohibited is listed in detail. Of practical significance: indecent images regardless of censoring or artistic merit; violent and shocking material; links leading to adult sites; presenting adult products through reviews and the diary; any activity whose main purpose is meeting members of the opposite sex; expressions leading to discrimination by nationality, race, sex and age; publishing other people's or your own personal data — phone number, email address, bank account number, address.
How to grow
The usual ways of building reach are explicitly banned. You may not indiscriminately send chat messages, friend requests, requests to join communities, or post messages; you may not leave mass, indiscriminate visit traces in order to attract click-throughs; you may not send invitations to strangers, obtain invitations through other people's blogs and message boards, or pass invitations on to third parties.
People search is separately restricted to protect minors: users under 18 are excluded from friend search results for users aged 18 and over, and the content of a friend request addressed to a minor is limited to template phrases.
The only legitimate way to grow here is to do what people come for: play games, keep a diary, support a community. The platform offers no accelerators.
Path to monetization
GREE does not pay creators.
Money in this system moves the other way — from the user to the platform. There is an internal currency: purchasing and using coins is governed by separate GREE terms on coins. There is also direct monthly payment: some apps offer monthly plans for buying items with money, bypassing coins — via carrier billing or a bank card; amounts under monthly plans are not part of the monthly coin spending limit and do not count towards it.
Spending caps are set for minors, and the platform states them as numbers: for users aged 15 and under — up to 5,000 yen a month; for users aged 16–17 — up to 10,000 yen a month.
Trying to earn money on the platform under your own steam is explicitly banned. The terms prohibit exchanging the right to use parts of the service for money, other property or a property benefit, as well as advertising, announcements and invitations to such an exchange. The company repeats this in its safety section too: exchanging in-game currency and items for money is prohibited, and buying and selling accounts is also a breach of the terms.
Tools and automation
The platform describes no open API for working with posts. On the contrary, the terms prohibit automated access: without the company's prior written consent you may not use robots, spiders, search and analysis applications, or any other manual or automated means to extract, index, scrape and collect information, or to bypass or copy the service's navigational structure. Separately prohibited is building a database by systematically downloading and storing material from the service.
Any automation add-ons in games are banned as well: cheats, exploits, automated software, bots, hacks and unauthorized modifications. The section on using the services safely repeats this in plain language: levelling a character around the clock with the help of special programs counts as a breach of the terms, even if there was no intent.
The conclusion is simple: scheduling and analytics tools for GREE do not exist not because the market failed to build them, but because the platform's terms do not allow them.
From the corporate side: the platform business is run by a separate legal entity — 株式会社グリー (Kabushiki-gaisha Gurī, GREE, Inc.), established in August 2024 for GREE Platform and software development, and it lists GREE Platform among its lines of business.
Limits and rules
- Geography. Japan only.
- Commercial activity. You may not post information or send chat messages whose purpose is the sale, purchase or exchange of goods and services, including advertising them, announcements and invitations — regardless of whether they are commercial in nature; you may not use the service for commercial purposes; pyramid schemes, chain letters, MLM and lead emails are prohibited; links to sites where invitations or partnerships earn points and other benefits are prohibited; "information products" are prohibited; medical and quasi-medical services are prohibited, including spiritual practices, power stones, counselling and fortune-telling. All of the above comes with the caveat "except where permitted by the company" (section 9, clause 3).
- Repeat posting. Multiposting, spam mailings and chain letters with identical content through the diary, communities and chat are prohibited.
- Politics and religion. Political and religious activity is prohibited, except where permitted by the company.
- Inactivity. If a year or more has passed since the last login to GREE or to an app, the company may terminate access and delete some data.
- Penalties. In case of a breach the company may delete material, suspend use of the service and revoke user status without prior notice; questions and complaints about deletion and suspension are not accepted.
- Age-related features. An age restriction in GREE chat, exclusion of minors from friend search and template friend requests for them.
- Law. The governing law is Japanese, and the court of exclusive first-instance jurisdiction is the Tokyo District Court. The terms were last revised on 1 January 2025.
Who it's for
A good fit for mobile game developers targeting the Japanese market: the platform was built around games from the start — the company points out that in May 2007 it released 釣り★スタ (Tsuri Suta, "Fishing"), which it calls the world's first mobile social game, and the games.gree.net portal is still laid out as a game storefront.
A good fit for watching the Japanese mobile entertainment market and as an object of investment interest: the group is listed on the stock exchange and discloses its reporting.
A poor fit for promoting a brand, goods and services: commercial activity by users is prohibited almost in full, including affiliate links, announcements and advertising. A poor fit for companies outside Japan — the terms limit use to the country's territory. A poor fit for automation: data collection by robots and any automated means require the company's written consent.
Verified data
The checked data this deep dive rests on.
About the platform
the platform describes itself this way: «ソーシャルゲームプラットフォーム「GREE（グリー）」は、人気ゲームが盛りだくさん！スマホから無料ソーシャルゲームを楽しむならGREE。»
Self-description: this is the platform's claim about itself, not an independent assessment
source, checked 2026-07-28
Languages
the interface language of the home page: ja
The language is taken from the markup attribute, the versions from hreflang
source, checked 2026-07-28
Catalogue section: all similar See also: catalogue index · region: Japan · scheduler comparison · find by situation · platform restrictions