Today took place the official presentation of the new social games company BDNA, a joint venture between Bandai Namco (75%) and DeNA (25%). As they announced in the previous report, the capital of the company will be 100M yen (1.3M$), starting operations next October 1st.
Shin Unozawa, COO & Vice President of Bandai Namco Holdings, will be the CEO of the new company. BDNA will be a consolidated subsidiary of Bandai Namco Holdings.
Isao Moriyasu, DeNA CEO (left), and Shin Unozawa (right) made the announcement. The name from the new company, BDNA, came from the acronyms of Bandai (BD), Namco (NA) and DeNA (DNA).
They shown the new logo as well:
Bandai Namco has the contents and the users, but they don't have the operational know-how for monetize them as DeNA/Mobage has. DeNA's objective is going global: they are expecting social games will reach soon the same quality as arcades and consumer games, so more and more people will use them.
Bandai Namco and DeNA collaborated before for developing Gundam Royale, a huge success with more than 3M users. Inside BDNA they plan to develop games from Macross series, Gundam series and Tamagotchi series.
Cie Games Japan [J] has begun to offer feature phone Mobage [J] service for the social game "Car Town." From September 15th (Thurs.) through September 18th (Sun.) they will also be opening a booth at the “Tokyo Game Show 2011,” held by Makuhari Messe.
"Car Town" is a feature phone social game based on Facebook’s PC social game "Car Town," which boasts 8 million active users a month. When they "Drive," users become a racer and advance through plotted maps throughout Japan, then they race in a showdown against a boss character for each map. There is a "Shop" for things like tire change and car wash, and users can collect their favorite cars by earning the virtual currency "Gear," while they compete in one of three types of "Race:" Drag race, Drift race, and Rally race. The collected cars' color, engine, and so on, can be modified, and the appearance and performance of the car can be customized to your liking. Cars which appear in the game include "Honda," "GM," "Ferrari," etc., and with licensed contracts with over 20 Japanese and overseas car makers, over 100 different actual car models are featured.
DeNA and GuruNavi have begun their collaboration plan "GuruNavi NEW Touch Local Recipe ♪," which links the social game "Bistro World" for Social networking service Mobage [J] with the gourmet information site "GuruNavi." [J]
"Bistro World" is a restaurant management social game where users learn menus from countries around the world and serve meals to other users, and while testing their skills in cooking competitions, strive to be the cooking king.
"GuruNavi NEW Touch Local Recipe ♪" uses coupons for cell phone and smart phone, and with the planned use of "GuruNavi NEW Touch" stickers which enable acquisition of store points, users can get "Local Menus" which can be used within "Bistro World" when they touch "GuruNavi NEW Touch" at a restaurant.
There are 10 types of "Local Menu," and once they’ve all been collected, users can receive a special menu. Members of "Mobage" as well as "GuruNavi" are applicable for participation. The term period is from August 31st (Weds.) at 3:00 P.M. until September 28th (Weds.) at 2:59 P.M.
Minna no Business Online (=business for everyone online) is a newly released web hosting service by Google in Japan, today on September 13 2011.
The site is, very different from typical Google web services, not under google domains but have its own jp domain (minbiz.jp), designed with vivid red, like the color which is used by the nation's largest e-commerce mall Rakuten [J].
Features they post on the top page are:
Easy for everyone to build
Free for 1 year
Specialized designs for many industry categories
Your own domain
On your registration, you will be asked a new domain name you want to use, from the selection of ".jp", ".com", ".net", ".org", ".biz" and ".info", which covers most top level domains Japanese companies usually choose.
You may choose about 100 different designs from 14 categories of industry. At the end of registration process, you need to receive an automatic phone call to get authenticated (that you are a real shop owner).
Google's motivations for the service seem on 2 points. Firstly, this service will start charging after 1 year, for example with ".jp" domain, 1,470 yen (US$19) per month. The other part is the site guides the new website owners to its advertising platform, AdWords.
The first case studies are introduced on the site. There Google took a small island Kouzusima, and let some small business owners make their first websites.
Moymoypalaboy's Everybody (Backstreet Boys) is a popular user generated movie played about 3 million times on YouTube. Then what is this movie rapidly adding its played count?
From the Japanese title
"【MMD】 「顔芸担当」 × 「エアボ兄弟」 でEVERYBODY 【オリジナル】"
"[MMD][Kaogei Tantou]x[Eabo Kyodai] de EVERYBODY [Original]",
which shows the left side movie is made by MMD = Miku Miku Dance. Eabo Kyodai = "Air-Vocal Brothers", is the name Japanese gave the Moymoypalaboy unit.
Miku Miku Dance is a free virtual 3D figure dance authoring tool, which was originally developed by fans of Vocaloid, human voice singing synthesizer software represented by pretty popular virtual diva Hatsune Miku, to promote Vocaloid singers over the web.
By MMD, many Japanese hobby video authors, who play around on Japanese online movie sharing service Nico Nico Douga, can make dynamic 3D animations with 3D figure data.
In August, the 7th online MMD contest was held virtually on Nico Nico Douga. Contestants were given some themes and create movies, compete with Nico Nico users vote.
The left side movie was one of the contestants, and the one with the original is "Hikaku douga"(movie for comparison), to show how their video is "synchronized" well with its motif.
The MMD contest had hundreds of such movies. Unfortunately most of them requires Japanese (especially anime) cultural contexts, but some use foreign-origined materials.
Remake the highlight scene of Equilibrium ("Rebellion" in Japan), Gun=Kata movie having cult-like popularity with Hatsune Miku.
Children's picture book "The Missing Piece" is known in Japan, too. This "Miku wo Sagashini", parodies its Japanese title "Boku wo Sagashini"("Seeking Myself") again features Hatsune Miku as a character.
If you have ever seen Ramen's The Japanese Tradition -Dogeza-, sarcastic gag film explaining Japanese genuflexion form of apology, is reproduced.
Sega's 3D battle game Virtua Fighter 2 demo scene with Vocaloid characters
The grand prized was given to this movie, a popular game character sing and dance a popular Vocaloid song.
As always, if you want to watch more of these movies than the ones copied into YouTube by someone, registering Nico Nico Douga and search by "MMD", "Miku Miku Dance" will give you thousands of MMD-made movies.
At this point, many of the user generated movies are trying to mimic the original, boasting how much they can reproduce scenes on the commercial products. But this widening trend with a lot of sunday video authors and free tools could generate something really interesting and original in near future.
