Tokyo-based DeNA is without a doubt the largest player in Japan’s social-gaming scene. Its Mobage service, a gaming platform for Japanese cell phones, has racked up 25 million user registrations since its debut in 2006, and the company grosses over $1 billion in sales every year. The amazing thing: Nearly all of their revenue comes exclusively from the Japanese market. Although they’ve had a presence overseas (they purchased mobile game dev ngmoco last year for $400 million), the company has yet to seriously challenge the international game market on its terms. Until now.
“We’ve been thinking about going international for the past three or four years, but the features gap between Japanese and overseas phones was so great that it was hard to take that step forward,” said Isao Moriyasu, DeNA’s COO and director of social media. “The smartphone marketplace has finally expanded now to the point where we can get serious about this.”
In the interview, published in this week’s issue of Japan’s Famitsu magazine, Moriyasu touted his company’s ngCore engine, as well as its patience in developing individual markets. “We want to provide a worldwide standardized development environment for developers to produce content [for our service] on,” he said. “If developers use the ngCore game development engine, they can produce a game that runs on both iPhone and Android devices with a single set of source code. I think the individual aspects of our service will be deployed in different ways between Japan and international. Services and social games are inherently regional in nature, so our intention is to go with the services that work in Japan or Europe or wherever with each individual area.”
