Japanese game giant DeNA buys Ngmoco for $400M

Japanese gaming company DeNA has announced plans to purchase Ngmoco for a cool US$400 million. This purchase sets quite a precedent as it represents one of the highest amounts ever paid for an iPhone application development firm.

DeNA sees the mobile social gaming market heating up rapidly. The company's founder and chief executive Tomoko Namba described his aggressive, forward-thinking vision to the New York Times: "The big tide in social gaming is coming, right now. We'd like to capture it and quickly become the world's No. 1 mobile gaming platform...We want to enable developers to go cross-device and to go cross-border. And we need this to happen quickly, in about the next one or two years."

Presently, DeNA runs Mobage Town, a wildly popular social gaming platform that is unique to Japan. The pricing model is interesting: the games are free but require users to create avatars that can be used to interact with each other. DeNA then sells clothes and other goodies for the avatars.

Good luck to DeNA and congratulations to Ngmoco. We're eager to see what the next chapter will bring.

[Via the New York Times]


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