Coffee Chat: Social Gaming Startups in Southeast Asia, the DeNA Perspective [LIVEBLOG]

This post is a part of our coverage of Startups in Asia (Singapore), Penn Olson’s first tech conference. Our full coverage of the event can be found here, for our RSS feed, click here.

Summary

Tetsuya Mori (pictured above on the left), managing director at DeNA Asia (and ex-VC at Mitsubishi UFJ Capital) joins us to give us his insights on the social gaming market in Southeast Asia. He’s based here in Singapore, not his native Japan, leading his company’s outreach across the continent.

Liveblog

#13:55: And after some closing quips, the coffee chat is over. Thank you, Mori San! (Next up is a love-blog of DeNA’s equally giant rival, GREE).

#13:53: “You can make a million dollars per month,” says Mori. Wow, I’m in the wrong job…

#13:49: “Games speak a lot,” Mori notes, and so a great game is key. “Excellent artwork is very important,” he says, and so he looks for those qualities in the many great game devs he meets in SE Asia, and he then wants them help to come to (aka: launch in) Japan and make money from their title.

But it’s not so easy. Even what’s considered cute – kawaiiiiiiiiii – differs across countries. It’s 80 percent different, that perception, between Japan and Indonesia, he says by way of example. Thinking of Moe, the anime character that’s so popular in Japan, Mori says that game developers should make characters as cute as Moe so as to capture the imaginations of Japanese gamers.

#13:47: Does Mori do any personal angel investing? “It’s a difficult business,” he says, which is not just about the return, but also “your own willingness to help.” But, alas, he says he doesn’t personally invest.

#13:42: GREE. The elephant in the room. It’s DeNA’s major rival (and the next coffee chat guest at 2pm) which has also set up an office in Singapore. Mori admits they’re very similar. Plus, it has GREE Ventures, which is treading on DeNA’s toes by hooking up some great gaming startups.

How about the ongoing GREE vs DeNA lawsuit? Mori says he was surprised to see the news of that, and then chuckles. “What we do is entertaining people, so this is entertainment too. It’s a game.” Oh well, it’ll pan out in the end.

#13:40: Who, asks PO’s Willis, is DeNA actually working with in Thailand? “Well, we have many friends,” says Mori. “And now we’re going through multiple channels” and looking at some developers, but he can’t elaborate further right now.

Korea is still a major focus, where online gamers are more numerous – and, I should point out, wealthier as well.