Mobage West

» see mobage.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

mobage west was the result of an idea that made sense on a slide deck. dena, the japanese company that ran mobage in japan (a mobile social gaming platform that had turned into a very profitable business on feature-phones and later smartphones), decided in 2010 that the western smartphone market was ready for the same play. it acquired ngmoco, a san francisco mobile gaming startup that had already built a small social-gaming network called plus+, and rebranded that network as mobage west in mid 2011.

in fairness the pitch had numbers behind it. mobage in japan was making dena hundreds of millions of dollars a year off titles like kaito royale and rage of bahamut. the japanese pattern was players buying gacha pulls on their phones inside a walled social platform where the platform took a cut of every transaction. dena's argument was that the smartphone in the us and the eu was fast becoming what the feature phone had been in japan, and someone would build the same kind of platform on it.

i was not the audience for any of this. by 2011 i was an early-career engineer in ankara, using android for messaging and browsing but not playing mobile social games. the western mobage titles never showed up on any turkish app store i noticed. mobage was english-language and us-facing. the whole plan was a japanese company trying to explain a japanese-style mobile ecosystem to american app-store users, and my orbit was orthogonal to that.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

mobage west exited beta in november 2011 with a pitch about first-party and third-party titles hitting the top 25 grossing charts on ios. that early moment was the peak. the platform had integrated third-party publishers like capcom mobile and konami, and dena was hiring aggressively out of the san francisco studio. the plan for 2012 was a big push into android and into europe.

the plan did not survive the market. western players did not want a walled-garden social layer between them and the game. they wanted to open an app, play it, and log out. the japanese pattern of a friend graph inside the platform, a currency that spanned games, a chat and community layer, all felt like extra work in the western context. by mid 2012 the mobage west revenue projections were being cut internally.

~ the wind-down ~

dena went through a couple of rounds of restructuring in 2013 and 2014. the ngmoco founders left. neil young and other senior people moved on to next things. on 19 december 2014, ngmoco officially rebranded mobage west back to dena, folding the western brand into the parent company name. the mobage.com english site kept operating in a diminished form for a few more years, mostly as a redirect and login surface for legacy accounts.

in 2016 dena shut its san francisco studio and closed most of the western operations. the japanese mobage service kept running normally at home. by 2018 there was no active western business behind the english site. it stopped serving on 9 august 2018 without a formal announcement, which is often how orphaned websites die inside a company that has already moved past them.

~ what got buried ~

what got buried was the theory that japanese mobile-social gaming was going to work in the west with a japanese-run publisher. that thesis was live from about 2010 to 2014, and it was tested more or less at the same time by dena's mobage west and by gree's western push through the openfeint acquisition. neither of them worked. the pattern that eventually won in the west was single-title free-to-play games like candy crush and clash of clans, and later western-released gacha titles like fate/grand order, without a platform layer between the game and the player. the mobage-shaped platform layer stayed a japanese phenomenon.

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