ngmoco boss Neil Young
On the DeNA deal, Mobage in the West and why Zynga's the competition
I think you have to approach each ecosystem differently. There are rules of operating in those ecosystems that differ between the two devices. So, for example, in iOS there are two very important considerations. The first is the business consideration, which is you're not permitted to provide and aggregated service, unless that's launching directly into a website. So you have to have a system that can function in a disaggregated environment, where you're downloading individual games that are connected together through the community services, much in the same way that Plus+ works today.
The second consideration is an Apple consideration: they have a wonderful device with wonderful user experiences, and the people at Apple are very, very focused on making sure that the games that come onto that platform are as good as they can possibly. That's the starting position, can you do great stuff that shows off our platform? So they've taken positions and on services and systems that they do or don't allow really around that - 'will it be a great experience for our users?' When you're building a service like this, how do you make sure that goal is upheld and that the games that come through this service and system are the very best they can be on that platform? That's the consideration there.
The Android ecosystem is much more open, and so you've got a very different set of considerations, and an opportunity to build a destination service much in the same way that DeNA has been able to build Mobage Town in Japan as a destination service. So what you want is the games and the community to be able to span across those ecosystems and then you want the distribution mechanisms to adhere to the different considerations of each platform. And then in Japan we've got Yahoo Mobage, a partnership with Yahoo, which internally we call Yabage... games use that same community, and they exist on the web.
There's an opportunity I think over time to basically build a game service that is almost device-independent. Phones, tablets, televisions.... What we're trying to do with this pivot that we're going to is something that's analogous to the last one. Last time we said 'okay, we see where this is going, and that's not going to be a big enough business for us' - at that time, really for survival reasons. So we pivoted, now we see the direction that free to play games go. That's actually a fine business from a commercial standpoint, but there's a bigger opportunity in front of us and I think we'll be able to tackle that effectively over the course of the next few years.
We have done many, many smaller pivots in many parts of our company. The idea of a pivot is institutionalised into the idea of the company. A major pivot is just something that changes everything, but you also do pivots on products where you go 'hey, we know where this going, y'know? We'd better change it.' And you also know sometimes those things work and sometimes they don't work. There's inherent risk whenever you change, but I think that we're fortunate in that we've always been able to and tried very hard to understand the market and the customers, and then make changes that serve where we see the market going based on that knowledge and insight.
No, it has to change. It has to. Because it's different, because it's for the feature phones... The feature phones in Japan, they're not the old Motorola Startac or something, they're actually quite powerful devices. So the gap between that and smartphones isn't that big. But there are differences, and there are differences in how applications are distributed. You have to be considerate of those things, and it does it require Mobage in Japan to go through a transition and a transformation. Whenever new technology comes out, there's an opportunity to disrupt. I think the challenge for the incumbents is to be able to manage through that disruption as effectively as possible.
When I think about DeNA's approach versus its competitor in the local market, Gree, DeNA has a strategy, it has a global strategy and it has a smartphone strategy. It also has a web strategy. Gree doesn't have a smartphone strategy, it doesn't have a global strategy, it doesn't have a web strategy. Right now, we're in the lead in terms of going through that transformation phase. In Japan, we're going to have to work really, really hard to make sure that when we come out of it we come out of it in an even stronger position than when we went into it.
I did hear it, yeah. Look, whenever you're in a competitive marketplace, I would say today we're ahead of Gree - DeNA and Gree have been fighting it out for dominance for a while now. I'm sure those two companies would try hard to beat the other.
I saw that news this morning too and spoke to Tomoko, she's in Paris right now, this morning, and she kind of gave me her context on it. I think it's interesting and understandable. It's not the first time that I've seen a large company being either investigated for or being attacked for being anti-competitive. I think it's happened to Microsoft, Apple and Google. I'm sure it'll happen to Facebook at some point... So maybe DeNA's moving into the league of being targeted. Maybe that's a good thing! [laughs]