Today, DeNA - a Japanese mobile gaming company - announced a partnership with Namco Bandai Games Inc. with the goal to bring popular titles into Japan’s mobile gaming market.
The rollout will bring known titles, such as Pac-Man and Xevious, to Japan’s leading mobile gaming social platform Mobage-Town. Namco Bandai will have it’s own portal within the platform to feature their titles - which the agreement calls for four titles immediately, followed by one title a month for one year.
This is a big step in the growth and development of DeNA, which is also making another notable collaboration with Yahoo! Japan, as well as investments in American mobile gaming companies such as Aurora Feint and IceBreaker. The investments are a step towards building a venture capital fund for gaming.
It’s interesting to see how foreign markets are progressing in their mobile gaming strategies and how they plan on growing the mobile gaming sphere. What’s great for those of us sporting iPhones is the investment DeNA placed in popular platforms like Aurora Feint, the developers of OpenFeint. If you play any games on your iPhone, there is a great chance one or two of the titles you play are linked with the OpenFeint network. With the investment they received, we can see the growth of our own platforms skyrocket even more rapidly than they already are.
Mobage-Town is Japan’s leading mobile gaming platform with 19 million subscribers and over 400 game titles including it’s most popular title, Bandit Nation.
The OpenFeint gaming network has over 28 million users and over 2,200 titles on it’s iPhone platform, and will be expanding to Android devices later this year.
How do you feel about the rapid growth of the mobile market? Do you think the start of venture capital funds for mobile gaming is a positive move?
