The Dominator of Japanese web Yahoo! Japan and DeNA, who runs one of big three Japanese social networking services Mobage Town, just announced to form an united front on PC social gaming. The new service tentatively called “Yahoo! Mobage” will launch late this summer.

According to the release, Yahoo! Mobage will have;

• social game platform has common accounts with Mobage Town
• transplanted games from mobile on Mobage Town
• Yahoo! Wallet payment service

They also will run cross-promotion to their Yahoo! ID/Mobage Town ID users.

Developers will be able to access the development platform early this summer.

Mutual complement of two big companies

If you see by stock value, Yahoo! Japan and DeNA are No.1 and No.3 among Japanese web companies among listed. Even though the number of registered user is ranked 3rd, after social network competitors Mixi and Gree, DeNA has been rapidly increasing their traffic in last half an year after its introduction of open social platform.

Yahoo! Japan did not have Yahoo Application Platform(YAP), which started on US Yahoo.com in 2008. So Yahoo! Japan has been just seeing social application platform wars between three social networking services which was started by Mixi, followed [J] by Mobage Town(DeNA), expecting Gree soon. Yahoo! Japan failed with two social networking services, Yahoo! Days and Yahoo! CU, despite they had the largest account base in Japan with Yahoo! ID.

Mobage Town, on the other hand, did not go well on transplanting their huge success in cellphone social games into PC world since their 2008 attempt.

So, this alliance is kind of those two successful companies admit their weakness.

See Also:

Yahoo! Japan’s release [J]

DeNA’s press release [J, pdf]

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Akky Akimoto

Leader at Asiajin

@akky is one of the first pro-bloggers in Japan [J]. He also leads Asiajin, writes for The Japan Times, consults for some foreign companies interested in Japanese web market. (please inquire to akimoto on gmail.com).

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