This article was published on July 25, 2012

Japanese mobile gaming platform DeNA lands on iOS in South Korea


Japanese mobile gaming platform DeNA lands on iOS in South Korea

The wait for mobile gaming platform DeNA is over for iOS device owners in Korea, after the Japanese games giant and local Web powerhouse Daum finally made the service available for the iPhone and iPad in the country.

The announcement of the launch [in Japanese, via Serkan Toto] comes some five months after the service landed on Android in Korea, and the first iOS game is now live: a localised version of We Rule. More significantly, however, the Daum Mobage SDK for iOS has been released, giving local developers the opportunity to build and port titles to the platform.

DeNA officially teamed up with Daum back in November, when it announced that it would work with the popular Web portal — which has 35 million users — but the joint platform has taken some time to launch for Apple devices.

The duo released the service for Android in February, with the aim to sign up 10 million gamers in the first year through the use of “aggressive marketing and a slate of high-quality games.”

With DeNA now supporting both iOS and Android in Korea, it is well placed to make further inroads into the country’s fast growing smartphone market. Despite blooming late, Korea’s smartphone penetration (ie the rate of mobile phone users that own a smartphone) recently passed 50 percent, and it now accounts for some 26 million units, the majority of which are iPhones or Android-based.

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DeNA first stepped into Korea in June 2011 when it launched its DeNA Seoul subsidiary.

In addition to South Korea, the company is focused on the US and China. Deals in the latter country have seen it link up with the likes of Sina Weibo, Renren, Alibaba, Baidu and all three mobile carriers.

Image via Flickr / Booleansplit

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