By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry

Tokyo-Based Mobile Game Maker Colopl To Get Listed Next Month [Social Games]

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Just a few days after social gaming company enish, Tokyo-based Colopl has filed with the Tokyo Stock Exchange to go public at the Mothers section for startups.

Colopl will get listed on December 13 (ticker: 3668), two days after enish.

Colopl is actually a very interesting developer.

The company is most famous for having provided what is one of the world’s first location-aware mobile games, Colony Life (players are supposed to build up colonies by traveling between different places in the real world to acquire virtual currency and location-specific items).

Colony Life came to life as a service in May 2005, while incorporation took place as late as 2008.

Colopl was able to grow and monetize the user base over time until Japan’s No. 2 telco KDDI bought a 5% stake in 2011.

That deal put the company’s valuation at US$125 million. The startup then started pushing out a number of very successful social/GPS-based smartphone games to the App Store and Google Play, which made the application to go IPO possible.

Colopl made 2.9 billion yen (US$36.5 million) in revenue between Oct 2011 and June 2012, while profit reached 0.87 billion yen (US$11 million).

More about Colopl can be found (in English) here.

About the author

Dr. Serkan Toto

I am the CEO & Founder of Tokyo-based Kantan Games Inc., an independent consultancy focused on Japan’s game industry.

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By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry