Ngmoco’s Young Gives a Saucy Rejoinder to Mobage Critics as Android Gaming Network Comes Out of Beta
Days after DeNA’s new Android mobile-social gaming platform Mobage came out of beta, the company’s U.S. subsidiary ngmoco:) is coming out swinging against critics who are skeptical that the Japanese gaming giant can make its business model work globally.
Early on, while the Mobage platform was still in beta in the U.S., several bonafide hits from the iOS world like Zombie Farm were seeing between just 5,000 and 10,000 installs on Android — a point competitors like China’s PapayaMobile were more than happy to jump on.
But ngmoco:) chief executive Neil Young pointed out that the company has tweaked its platform enough that its games are now rising up the Android charts. Zombie Farm is now the #3 free game in the Android Market in the U.S. and has between 500,000 and 1 million installs while Pocket Frogs cracked the 100,000 to 500,000 install range over the weekend.
“That criticism is coming from a competing platform with a whole bunch of shitty games,” Young said. “What PapayaMobile said was a little bit mean-spirited, whereas my statement about them having shitty games is just fact.”
Young said the company had made more than 100 changes to the Mobage product since it entered beta in July. He said user flow was initially a challenge as users had to download a Mobage app before they could play the game. Now, he says there’s a Mobage service application embedded inside of all of the games on the network. When users download a game on the platform now, there’s a shortcut inside to the Mobage network.
He added that just because Japanese consumer spending habits on mobile games are still fairly different from behavior in Western markets, it doesn’t mean that users here won’t follow the same arc.
“It’s easy to say that Japan is like the Galapagos Islands and that it has no bearing on what will happen in the U.S.,” he said. “But if you look at U.S. behavior, it looks eerily similar to what happened to Japan in the mid-2000s.”
ngmoco:) is under pressure to deliver this quarter. One hundred million dollars of the $403 million maximum acquisition price DeNA agreed to pay for the company last year is contingent on its performance by December.
On top of that, DeNA said in its most recently quarterly earnings report that its goal for the Mobage global platform was to reach $50 million in Moba-coin consumption during the quarter ending in March of next year. Ultimately, it wants to see $100 million in Moba-coin spending per quarter and an iOS version of the network should be out by November of December. Moba-coins are Mobage’s cross-game currency. (When Mobage comes to iOS, Mobacoins will only work with the game that the user purchased them with, since Apple doesn’t allow cross-game currencies.)
It’s understandable why some competitors would be fearful of a DeNA-backed mobile gaming network. Because of its parent company, ngmoco:) has deep pockets to attract developers on terms that are more favorable to them and it’s signed up dozens over the last few months (see below).
DeNA is likely to be more willing to stomach losses over time to acquire market share and had 66.5 billion yen ($851.3 million) in cash and cash equivalents at the end of the most recent quarter. Other competing networks like PapayaMobile and Heyzap are capitalized with first or second rounds of venture funding.
November 2nd, 2011 at 3:09 pm
As I understood it, it was GREE (not, or as well as PapayaMobile) that was pointing out Mobage’s lack of Android downloads during the beta – a slightly more beefy competitor to DeNA given its recent earnings boost
November 2nd, 2011 at 3:12 pm
Hey Jon, do you have the link to that? I’ll put it in (cite you, etc.)
November 2nd, 2011 at 11:27 pm
http://www.pocketgamer.biz/r/PG.Biz/PapayaMobile+news/news.asp?c=32707
November 2nd, 2011 at 11:45 pm
as reported on the website that Jon Jordan runs/edits.
November 3rd, 2011 at 5:39 am
[...] Hats off to ngmoco CEO Neil Young, who has responded to recent jibes from social mobile gaming rival PapayaMobile with a forthright blast of annoyance, revealed on Inside Mobile Apps. [...]
November 3rd, 2011 at 7:44 am
Hey there, I also reported on that too. (http://www.insidemobileapps.com/2011/08/24/papayamobile-25-million-dena-mobage/). I was referring to GREE’s criticism of Mobage on Android, as I hadn’t seen that.
November 3rd, 2011 at 9:37 am
I don’t think Papaya’s games are bad. They’re actually quite good. Their ARRPU of $20+ clearly shows that people really enjoy their games and are willing to spend in them.
I am more curious to know what were Mobage’s tweeks that pushed them to #3. They still clearly have a lot of catching up to do with Papaya.
November 4th, 2011 at 1:20 am
[...] Based on these good numbers, ngmoco boss Neil Young is starting to feel more confident. [...]
November 4th, 2011 at 1:23 am
I would be very interested to see what Neil means by:
“But if you look at U.S. behavior, it looks eerily similar to what happened to Japan in the mid-2000s.”
No, it doesn’t, not at all.
November 4th, 2011 at 9:01 am
Hey Serkan, I don’t know Japanese consumer behavior anywhere remotely near as well as you do. What do you mean? (Just so I can ask for next time….)
November 7th, 2011 at 9:46 pm
Well cursing is usually the last resort of someone who doesn’t have anything left to say. Papaya’s games are ok, not amazing, but ngmoco ): performance was definitely below par. It never worked well for me.
November 8th, 2011 at 8:57 am
[...] iOS versions of Mobage games will be required to work with a single in-game currency, as apparently cross-game currencies are not allowed on iOS, according to ngmoco’s Neil Young. It’s why Mobage games haven’t yet launched on [...]
December 7th, 2011 at 10:19 am
[...] and the growing Ngmoco:)-run version of DeNA’s Mobage platform. Mobage, like PapayaMobile, will soon be cross platform on both Android and iOS. To add even more difficulties, GREE’s new network will [...]
December 27th, 2011 at 8:22 am
[...] growth. DeNA acquired ngmoco:) last year for up to $403 million. As a U.S. subsidiary, ngmoco:) has built up the Western-facing side of the company’s mobile gaming platform and brought it out of… Inside Mobile Apps [...]
January 24th, 2012 at 11:16 am
[...] competing against a very deep field. Japan’s DeNA has been pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into a new global mobile gaming … while GREE plans to re-launch a mobile gaming network in the first half of this year. There are [...]
February 6th, 2012 at 1:22 pm
[...] mobile-gaming platforms that replicate their virtual currency-dependent model in Western markets. Ngmoco launched DeNA’s Mobage gaming platform formally last fall and has signed up prominent developers including Nimblebit, TinyCo and Glu [...]
February 6th, 2012 at 11:16 pm
[...] Ngmoco是DeNa海外收购战略的一个关键部分，DeNA和GREE都希望可以在西方市场复制其在日本市场的虚拟货币盈利模式。Ngmoco推出了移动游戏平台梦宝谷，并且跟Nimblebit, TinyCo 和Glu Mobile在内的牛叉开发商建立起良好的合作关系。 [...]
February 7th, 2012 at 7:05 am
[...] their key competitors, Mobage, who have taken the route of limiting their service on iOS to where Mobacoins are only usable in the app they are purchased in, per Apple guidelines, instead of being usable across various apps that use their services like on Android and other [...]
March 7th, 2012 at 5:54 pm
[...] it took longer than originally anticipated to roll out Mobage in English-speaking markets. There were a few kinks during the beta because DeNA made consumers download a special Mobage app before getting the games they wanted. That hurt pick-up, so Ngmoco quickly changed its [...]
May 16th, 2012 at 1:44 pm
[...] iTunes App Store. It’s a sign that the long-delayed iOS version of the Mobage platform — originally scheduled to come out sometime in either November or December 2011 — is finally [...]
June 13th, 2012 at 10:06 am
[...] DeNA is a Japanese multi-billion dollar mobile gaming giant that has been trying to crack Western markets over the last three years. It spent up to $403 million to buy a U.S. mobile gaming company started by EA veterans called Ngmoco in 2010, and then it took about a year for the company to fully launch a global mobile gaming network called Mobage. [...]
June 13th, 2012 at 10:31 am
[...] [...]