'The big tide in social gaming is coming, right now...'
Japanese social games firm DeNA is to acquire ngmoco for $400 million, the company has confirmed.
The deal, which was strongly rumoured last week, is one of the biggest exits for an iPhone games publisher, although ngmoco recently expanded onto Android.
"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," DeNA CEO Tomoko Namba tells the New York Times.
"We’re only active in the Japanese market, and we haven’t figured out how to cover the Western market. 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."
DeNA's acquisition of ngmoco will fuel its rivalry with US firm Zynga - set to become one of the defining battles of cross-platform social gaming in the next year or two.
DeNA plans to integrate ngmoco's Plus+ community with its own Mobage platform.
"Whether you’re a developer in Japan working on a Mobage, or you’re a developer in the West making apps, you’ll be able to work with us, and your games will be able to move across borders and move across devices," says ngmcoco boss Neil Young.
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