San Francisco-based mobile gaming startup Funzio had just come off making more than $5 million in sales per month when it sold to Japan’s GREE for $210 million last week. Profits may be another story, and there’s less visibility into that. But Funzio had to decide between raising additional funding or selling at the time the deal happened.
The numbers were revealed in GREE’s earnings statement today. Funzio’s acquisition comes at a very fascinating time for GREE, a $4.8 billion mobile gaming company from Japan. Like Zynga in the U.S., GREE and its archrival DeNA are part of a younger vanguard of freemium gaming companies that have found success in their home market of Japan.
But there are threats on the horizon. GREE’s shares were absolutely slaughtered on the Tokyo Stock Exchange on Monday. The company’s shares fell a record 23 percent after the Japanese government said it was investigating the legality of various game mechanics in the social gaming industry. → Read More
Japanese gaming giant GREE just acquired mid-core, mobile game developer Funzio for $210 million in an all-cash deal that should boost its ability to build games for Western audiences. Funzio is behind Crime City, Modern War and Kingdom Age, which are graphical RPGs that have had more than 20 million downloads on Apple’s iOS, Android or Facebook platforms.
I had heard a few weeks back that Funzio was in a fundraising process at a $350 million post-money valuation and had also been loosely talking to various buyers in an auction-style process. Apparently, the fundraising efforts helped tip Funzio into a sale, but maybe not at the valuation I had originally heard about. Still, $210 million is not bad at all, considering that the company had raised about $20 million to date from IDG Ventures and Playdom co-founder Rick Thompson. For comparison, Draw Something-maker OMGPOP went to Zynga for $180 million in cash plus an undisclosed earnout.
Why did GREE buy Funzio? GREE is a multi-billion dollar mobile gaming company from Japan that is trying to break into Western markets. Its profit margins put Zynga to shame, but the company is running out of room to grow as its home country becomes saturated. → Read More
It’s no secret that Japanese mobile social gaming company GREE is aggressively pursuing the U.S. markets, especially with the $104 million acquisition of mobile gaming platform OpenFeint earlier this year.
Now with sights set on establishing a large engineering and development presence in Silicon Valley, the company has added a new billboard on I-80 northbound to advertise for job openings in the company’s California office. This is the third billboard GREE has put up to attract talent (the others are positioned on highway 101). → Read More
Japanese mobile social gaming giant and Openfeint owner GREE has outlined today its previously announced plan to launch a mobile social gaming network for the global market next year. Details are (relatively) scarce at this point, but the publicly traded company (current market cap: US$7.5 billion) seems to be serious in positioning itself against Facebook Mobile as a gaming platform for smartphones.
In the press release, the word “Openfeint” not even appears once. Instead, GREE aims at launching a unified gaming platform that knows no borders: new users and the existing 155 million players on GREE in Japan and Openfeint worldwide will be able to use a single-sign on to register and play together. There will also be a payment system for virtual goods that works internationally and a “a series of robust out-of-network cross promotional opportunities” plus analytics tools for game developers on iOS and Android. → Read More
GREE and Mobage are brand names that don’t ring a bell with too many people (yet) as far as markets like the US or Europe are concerned, but these mobile social gaming platforms are hugely successful in Japan. The Tokyo-based companies behind these homegrown gaming networks, GREE and DeNA, reported some big financial numbers today.
DeNA (current market cap: US$6.4 billion) today announced sales reached US$457 million for the second quarter of this fiscal (through the end of September 2011), while operating income hit a mind-boggling US$203 million. That translates into 28% and 13% year-on-year growth, respectively.
→ Read More
Survival horror video game series Resident Evil has sold well over 45 million units since the first title came out back in 1996, on various platforms, for example the PlayStation 1, the Nintendo DS, or the iPhone. But there has never been a mobile social game in the series (“Biohazard” in Japan) – until this week. → Read More
Mobile gaming startup OpenFeint, has been acquired by Japanese mobile gaming company GREE for $104 million in cash plus additional capital for growth of the OpenFeint platform. OpenFeint and its team will remain with long-term incentives, including CEO and founder Jason Citron, says the company.
OpenFeint provides a comprehensive mobile social gaming platform for the iPhone and Android platforms. OpenFeint’s plug and play mobile social platform and application for smartphones includes a set of online game services such as leaderboards, virtual currencies and achievements running in a cloud-based Web environment. → Read More
We’ve all got iPhone mania in the Valley, never mind that Apple tracks our every move and won’t explain why or that AT&T users can’t actually make calls.
But in Asia– and much of the rest of the developing world– the anticipated mobile giant is Android. Android phones are just starting to hit Japan and China, and a flood of cheap new models are expected to come on the market within the next year. Expect a flood of new apps to follow that, particularly in China where venture capital is flowing like water.
The rise of Android is as close to a no-brainer prediction as you can make with always volatile and uncertain emerging markets. Combine the market size of countries like Japan, China, Indonesia and India with cheap, increasingly-sophisticated devices and a massive base of gamemakers and hackers and someone is going to make a lot of money. → Read More
Big news from Asia’s social games industry today: Japanese mobile social gaming juggernaut GREE and mig33, a mobile community that’s especially popular in Asia, have just announced [PDF] a cooperation with the potential to change the social gaming market in the region.
Under the agreement, mig33 adopts the “GREE platform for smartphone”, which means that smartphone games that have been created using the technical specifications of GREE’s Japanese platform can now be easily ported to mig33, and vice versa. → Read More
Bad news from Japan’s multi-billion dollar social gaming industry earlier this week: Tokyo-based mobile gaming heavyweight DeNA (current market cap: US$4.5 billion) was investigated on Wednesday by the Japan Fair Trade Commission (JFTC) over antitrust issues.
The allegation: DeNA, which recently paid US$400 million to acquire American smartphone game maker ngmoco, pressured Japanese mobile game developers to release titles exclusively on Mobage-town (its mobile social gaming community) – and to not provide games on rival GREE‘s mobile platform. → Read More
The tech IPO is not completely dead. Last Wednesday, Japan’s third largest social network GREE, launched in 2004 by the company of the same name, listed its IPO shares on the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s Mothers market for start-ups. GREE caused a sensation in this year’s lackluster Japanese IPO market with shares rising a whopping 52% from $37 to $56 on the first trading day.
The company now has a market capitalization of over $1.3 billion, which is even more than that of Mixi, Japan’s biggest social network that’s also listed (at around $970 million). The successful debut instantly made GREE the No. 4 player among Japan’s listed web companies. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
