Do you believe in social gaming? Do you believe in it enough to spend $400 million dollars in the acquisition of one of mobile gaming’s bigger companies? DeNA does, as they just purchased Ngmoco, in the hope that they’ll be able to directly compete with Facebook, Zynga, and others in the game.
If you haven’t heard of DeNA, you’re not alone. he company, based solely in Japan, has purchased Ngmoco in an attempt to start competing outside of their borders, in the global marketplace. It’s not exactly a bad time to do it either. According to a New York Times article, Screen Digest has “forecast that the social games market would grow to $1.5 Billion in 2013, from about $640 million in 2009.” That’s a lot of money on the table, and if DeNA is even slightly successful, it could mean huge profit margins for the company.
So what’s DeNA’s plan?
According to the Times, they’re planning on melding together the Plus+ network and their own in house Mobage framework to give gamers and developers access to both western world networks and customers in Japan. Increasing the reach of DeNA seems to be priority one, and clearly the purchase of Ngmoco is the first major step in that direction.
Article Via The New York Times
