Ngmoco owner DeNA wants Zynga collaboration

The CEO of Japan’s social gaming giant has offered Zynga the opportunity to work together rather than clash heads.

Zynga is one of the game industry’s fastest-growing studios of all time, valued at $5 billion just three years into business.

Having become a white-hot prospect in the US, and now Europe, analysts expect the firm to become a transcontinental enterprise with similar successes across Asia.

Yet in Japan, social studio DeNA is growing at a similarly furious pace, taking in $1.2 billion in revenues this year from 20 million users.

Though conflicts in business intentions appear inevitable, DeNA CEO Tomoko Namba said her firm could, in fact, work with the Farmville creator.

“Zynga is a game developer and we are more interested in platforms,” she said at a recent event.

“I would like to welcome [Zynga] onto our platform, that’s our aspiration,” she added.

“We are big enough in Japan, there is more chance maybe to work with Zynga [there]. There is collaboration opportunity maybe more than competitiveness.”

Yet Namba’s sentiment was not echoed by the boss of subsidiary studio Ngmoco, which was recently bought by DeNA for $400 million.

Neil Young told GamesIndustry.biz “at the end of the day [I think] probably we’ll be slugging it out with Zynga.”

He added: "[Zynga] are formidable competitors. We have a lot of respect for them, and they’ve built an incredible company, so we’ll see. Maybe we can all just make nice and have our games on each other’s platforms.”

Namba is looking to expand her firm into Europe, it was revealed last week.

DeNA is being investigated by regulators amid accusations of unfair business practices.

The Japanese firm is accused of trying to stop developers publishing games on rival sites.