leweb-2010
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DeNA and Rovio Mobile chat from LeWeb '10 in Paris
Stuart Dredge over at MobileEntertainment is reporting live this week from Paris' LeWeb 2010 conference, and quite a few iPhone publishers and developers are in attendance and talking about Apple's platform and beyond. Of the most interest to us are probably the statements by Japanese publishers DeNA (who recently bought Ngmoco) and Angry Birds developer Rovio Mobile. First up, DeNA says it's still got acquisition money to spend, and while most of the company's business is currently running on feature phones in Japan, it's very much seeking out smartphone developers in North America and Europe to run social games on its platform. And DeNA's representative, Tomoko Namba, even says that Zynga would be welcome to join them. DeNA is trying to build a platform, not necessarily specific games. It'll be very interesting to see what happens with DeNA in the future -- it's clear that they don't know a lot about how to run mobile games in the US, but joining up with Ngmoco (and whoever else they pull on board) is a good way to learn how to do that. Rovio Mobile is at LeWeb as well, sharing that Angry Birds has reached 12 million paid downloads and 30 million free downloads on other platforms. The company says that ads have worked out very well on platforms besides iOS, but on iOS, with a trusted store in place, paid still seems to be their system of choice. Rovio also confirms that the game is probably headed to consoles next year and even teases some new, non-Angry Birds related titles coming in the near future. There's no question that 2010 was a landmark year for mobile gaming, so it'll be interesting to see what happens next year.
