Ngmoco is a “Young” company
When speaking of mobile apps for the Iphone, Ngmoco comes to mind first and foremost. The future of gaming on Iphone or the Ipad was a vision held by Neil Young, the head CEO of Ngmoco. This vision included becoming the largest mobile app provider equivalent to what was done by Electronic Arts.
Being an ex-employee of EA, Young understood the transition from packaged games to the emerging of social mobile games. He saw that down the road most everyone would have a phone or some type of mobile devise that could be tapped into and give us the freedom of playing our favorite (or even better games) right in the palm of our hands.
Young developed this company in 2008, and since had his eye on future social gaming along with Iphone mobile gaming applications. Wanting to be one of the largest gaming companies in the world, Young wanted to be disruptive and impactful in developing games that would grasp the mobile user’s imagination.
At the time for Young it was a gamble, you had companies like Zynga rushing to make games for the social networks such as Facebook, and DeNA having huge success in Japan. Young wanted very much to imitate the success of DeNA and often referred to Ngmoco as the “DeNA of the West” this was even before merger talks.
In October 2010 this dream of disruption came true, the acquisition of Ngmoco transpired for a tidy sum of $400 million, making Ngmoco part of the largest mobile gaming companies in the world.
Ngmoco, being the game developer of games we are big fans of; Godfinger, the We series games, We-doodle, We rule, Gun range, Charadium to name a few, has coupled with DeNA to build the Open Mobage, which is a software development kit that will add features to the games developed by other mobile developers.
The funny thing is that OpenFeint is a social mobile game platform company that Open Mobage will rival; the neat thing is 20% of OpenFeint is owned by DeNA. This is to say nothing of how strong OpenFeint is with well over 3000 games out there using it.
To date Ngmoco has also been busy with other ventures, such as the DeNA group (which includes Ngmoco) have partnered with Samsung to offer the platform Mobage to the Samsung Smartphones last December. Not to mention the first brand integration for Microsoft Windows into any or all of Ngmoco’s mobile games like Godfinger All-Stars.
Oh, let’s not forget the rumor that Google Ventures has made a tiny investment in Ngmoco. Shhhhh
Understanding where this is headed and all the possibilities that will be presented will be fun to watch. I just wish they would take some time out of their busy schedule to update Godfinger, we haven’t seen anything since last Christmas “GUYS.” I will give them a break right now but I would like to see something soon.
Young’s ability to forecast the direction of platforms and their movement from phones to pads then TV’s makes him and Ngmoco big players in the future of gaming and integration. An example of that was his ability to create the “free to play” business model, this aloud games to become more social and in the process realized a huge revenue jump.
The company continues to grow and is worth keeping an eye on. Here at xbox360videogames.com we would really like to see what’s next from a company that has developed so quickly. With well over 130 employees committed to gaming quality and performance Ngmoco is one for the record books.
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12 May 2011, 5:04 pm
We doodle app for my iPhone is having some major issues. I love the game. It’s probably my all time favorite. Problem is it keeps having problems the effect the game points. And crash’s often. I hope this issue can be resolved soon!