We just received word from Japanese mobile social gaming company DeNA announcing that it plans to pick up Punch Entertainment Vietnam, the Hanoi-based studio owned by Punch Entertainment, Inc. in California.
The company’s announcement elaborated that Punch Entertainment Vietnam will “provide engineering support” to DeNA’s Mobage development team in Japan, and later elsewhere. President Isao Moriyasu commented on the acquisition:
[PEV] is an excellent addition to DeNA’s first party game development team with its proven track record of developing cross-platform social games. We believe the acquisition will significantly accelerate DeNA‘s game development and deliver high-quality social games for the Mobage platform.
We don’t know too much about Punch Entertainment Vietnam, but a selection of games that it has developed is listed here. It seems one of its titles, Ego, took the Most Innovative game award way back in 2008 thanks to its social networking-based approach to mobile gaming. That certainly sounds like a natural fit.
A representative with DeNA tells Penn Olson this afternoon that it is “acquiring the high-quality ‘hands’ that [are] very well accustomed to developing social games for smartphones.” He added “We are hoping to support the overall ecosystem of local developers as well.”
This is just the latest in a flurry of announcements from DeNA this summer, including its most recent one regarding the establishment of DeNA Asia, headquartered in Singapore.
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