Inside Social Games

It’s been a busy couple of weeks for Aurora Feint as their mobile, social platform, OpenFeint begins offering new features, and its games department works diligently on its secret projects. Most recently, at the Virtual Goods Summit in San Francisco, DeNA, the operator of Japan’s largest mobile social network and virtual goods economy, has chosen OpenFeint as its partner to break into the Japanese smartphone market. DeNA is intending to make a “multi-million dollar investment in Aurora Feint for a 20% stake in the company.”

Working on both computers and mobile devices, Tokyo-based DeNA is known best for its mobile social platform, Mobage-Town. Powered by free-to-play games, the company boasts a 70% market penetration rate among its teen demographic, generating between 500-600 million page views a day from what it calls its “sticky users.” The company says that Mobage-Town generates upwards of $200 million in annual revenue (despite recent legal trouble with competitor GREE) with a “high” profit margin.

The revenue stems from avatar-related sales, advertisement, and virtual goods, and with over 250 games that vary from simple Flash titles to complex, massively multiplayer worlds, as well as 15 million users, you can bet that these revenue streams are plentiful. Suffice to say, this makes DeNA a good fit for OpenFeint and vice versa.

In order to christen the partnership, one of DeNA’s major partners, and veteran entertainment company, Hudson, has also agreed to use OpenFeint as their platform for their upcoming game line up, marking what Aurora Feint Chairman and founding investor, Peter Relan describes as “a small demonstration of the strength of the DeNA partnership.”

As for the “line up” itself, it’s entirety is yet to be made public, but most people ought to recognize the one that was mentioned. The first Japanese game for OpenFeint, scheduled for launch this Christmas will be the ever popular, and well known, Bomberman. Having been the first games producer to enter the mobile realm back in 2000, this makes Hudson and excellent first developer for OpenFeint in these newer, international waters.

“We believe that OpenFeint is an extremely powerful social networking solution in the ever-changing iPhone market,” says Masato Shibata, Corporate Officer of Hudson Soft Co., Ltd. “We are planning to release several games which utilize this beneficial tool to the fullest extent.”

It’s been a long road for Aurora Feint since they launched OpenFeint over seven months ago. We’re interested to see where this partnership takes it.