ngmoco

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

~ the eulogy ~

ngmoco was built for a device that was, in Turkey in 2009, a locked premium import with a carrier contract stapled to it. The name stood for next generation mobile company, which is an ugly thing to say out loud and an accurate description of what it was doing. Neil Young started it in july 2008, the same month the App Store opened, having just walked out of Electronic Arts where he had run the Los Angeles studio.

The founding thesis was narrow and correct. Everyone else treated the iPhone as a place to port something, and Young treated it as a platform with its own grammar. No buttons, and a screen you touch with the same finger you point with. Behind it sat a store that could push an update to everybody overnight. Rolando arrived in december 2008, made with Simon Oliver's HandCircus, and it was the first iPhone game that felt designed rather than adapted. It sold at premium price and it sold well.

Then ngmoco stopped doing that. Eliminate Pro came out free with an energy meter that refilled on a timer or refilled instantly if you paid. We Rule, in 2010, was a farm-shaped tap-and-wait game that made more money than the premium catalog ever had. Within about two years the company had talked itself out of the business model that made its best game and into the one that made its numbers.

I watched this from the engineer's side of the glass, reading about App Store revenue charts the way you read about a market you are not in. Turkey in those years ran on Nokia and Symbian for anyone who was not paying for a status object, and the audience ngmoco was designing for was an American holding a four-hundred-dollar phone with a card already attached to it. The distance was real at the time. It closed completely later, which is the joke: the mechanics ngmoco normalized are now in the free games on every phone in this country.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

By march 2009 ngmoco titles had passed seven million installs, which in 2009 was an enormous number for a store that was eight months old. The company shipped fast and shipped a lot, and some of it was throwaway, but the throwaway work was how it learned what a touchscreen wanted.

On 15 june 2009 it launched the Plus+ Network, run by Simon Jeffery out of Sega and LucasArts. Plus+ gave third party developers a friends list and a cross-game identity at a time when Apple had shipped neither. Game Center arrived a year later and made the whole category redundant, which is the same wall OpenFeint hit.

~ what it became ~

On 12 october 2010 DeNA announced it was buying ngmoco for four hundred million dollars. DeNA ran Mobage in Japan, a mobile social gaming business that was printing money on feature phones, and it wanted a Western beachhead badly enough to pay a number nobody in mobile had seen before.

ngmoco became DeNA's Western headquarters, with studios opened in Vancouver, Stockholm, Amsterdam and Santiago. Mobage launched in the West and did not take. The pattern that worked in Japan, where a carrier billing relationship and a social graph came bundled, did not transplant onto a market where Apple owned the wallet. Young left in 2014. The other founders went too.

~ the day it died ~

On 18 october 2016 DeNA announced it was dissolving and liquidating DeNA Global in San Francisco along with its other overseas subsidiaries, ngmoco included. The stated reason was that the Western games had not met expectations. The wind-down was booked at around twenty-nine million dollars.

The timing tells the rest. DeNA had just signed the Nintendo partnership and decided its future in the West was licensing other people's characters rather than running its own studios there. Six years after paying four hundred million dollars for a company that understood the iPhone better than anyone, it closed the whole thing and kept the contact list.

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