CyberAgent had an excellent first financial quarter in fiscal 2012 overall, and in the gaming/Ameba segment in particular. The company also shared plans for its gaming business in the next few months during the earnings call.
It seems CyberAgent is determined to push more aggressively into the social gaming business than ever before.
Probably the most significant part: CyberAgent CEO Susumu Fujita said his company is ready to open the Ameba platform on smartphones for third-party developers in May this year, without giving further details.
Here’s the slide from CyberAgent’s 1Q FY2012 presentation (click to enlarge):
Seeing that their core service Ameba has over 20 million users now, and that half of those are subscribed to virtual world Ameba Pigg (which already offers in-world social games), DeNA and GREE should be worried, at least to some extent.
Operating a platform, deploying self-developed games for a while first, and then opening the platform to third-party developers – that’s the exact same strategy DeNA and GREE successfully pursued with their own networks. The screenshots shown on the slide above are reminiscent of the look and feel of Mobage and GREE on smartphones.
CyberAgent also announced some of the games it currently has in its product pipeline, on Ameba Pigg and smartphones:
