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Deal documents show Ngmoco's 50 million downloads, $10m losses in 2009
Stuart Dredge of MobileEntertainment did some digging into the paperwork behind the Ngmoco sale, and came back with some interesting figures about the company's financials. Turns out that rumored $403 million purchase price is true -- kind of. The deal includes a $100 million bonus, if Ngmoco keeps its numbers up to certain standards. The actual payment now is $303 million, which consists of $146 million in common stocks, $27 million in DeNA investments, and $128 million cash. That cash payment, Dredge reports, is about a third of DeNA's total cash balance, so this is a significant deal for both companies. Meanwhile, the documents state that Ngmoco has seen 50 million downloads on the App Store as of last month, and has 12 million users on the Plus+ network across 119 games (as a comparison, OpenFeint announced 25 million users this year, although of course that service is spread across many more titles). And perhaps most interesting, Ngmoco is growing, but has spent a lot of money for that growth. In 2008, its revenues were only $484,000, and it lost $2.46 million. 2009 went better on the revenue side, jumping up to $3.16 million, but the company's losses came out to a whopping $10.89 million. Pretty amazing that financials like that led to a sale of $403 million -- both Ngmoco and DeNA must expect a lot from this partnership in the future.
iPhone OS 4.0: Apple announces Game Center, a social gaming network for the iPhone
This is huge -- Apple has announced Game Center, an official social gaming network for the iPhone, coming to the device along with OS 4.0 this summer. So far, there have been a few social networks vying for an audience in the form of OpenFeint and Ngmoco's Plus+ system, but Apple's going official, bringing in friends lists, leaderboards, achievements, matchmaking, and so on all to the iPhone themselves. Jobs said on stage in Cupertino that they will combine GameCenter with the App Store's over 50,000 games and entertainment titles. It'll be extremely interesting to see how Apple's network interacts with App Store titles, and it looks like OpenFeint and the like have some serious first-party competition.
