Japan’s DeNA signs up Kabam and Nimblebit

Japan’s DeNA mobile social gaming network has signed up a couple of key American game partners as it expands in the U.S.

Ngmoco, the U.S. division of DeNA, said that hardcore social gaming firm Kabam has agreed to publish games on the Android platform using DeNA’s Mobage social gaming network.

DeNA made the announcement at the Mobage forum in Tokyo, Japan, where more than 1,000 developers are attending to learn how to make games for the social network, which has tens of millions of users worldwide. The first title from San Francisco-based Kabam, which has launched on mobile and is aggressively expanding beyond Facebook, will appear on Mobage this summer. Kabam’s first mobile game, Kingdoms of Camelot: Battle for the North, has drawn more than 1 million users on the iPhone.

“A lot of our work is coming to fruition,” said Clive Downie, vice president at Ngmoco, in an interview with GamesBeat. “Kabam is one of the leading hardcore game companies on social, and they will bring their titles to mobile over a period of time.”

Another new developer that has signed up to make games for Mobage is NimbleBit, the San Francisco-based company that has made big iPhone hits such as Tiny Tower and Pocket Frogs. The group will now make Android games such as Pocket Planes, an airline simulation, for Mobage.

Mobage currently has more than 50 third-party developers in the West that are making titles for the platform. One of the successes on the Western version of Mobage is Rage of Bahamut by Cygames, which has hit the top spot on Google Play’s Top Grossing Android Apps list this week. Cygames took its original Japanese game, Shingeki-No-Bahamut, and launched it in the West as a fantasy-adventure game.

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