DeNA Starts Integrating Casino Games Into its Chat App Comm

Dr. Serkan Toto is a gaming expert and independent consultant based in Tokyo. You can follow him on Twitter and his blog. This article is republished with his permission.

All the buzz has died down about Comm, the chat app DeNA (TYO:2432) started rolling out in October last year. According to the last official word a few months ago from the Mobage operator, the app racked up a total of five million users.

That number is surely higher now. Comm has been advertised on TV in Japan. But I doubt there is a lot of faith left inside DeNA to turn comm into a real competitor for Line or KakaoTalk.

The company, however, isn’t giving up.

So far, DeNA has kept Comm and its social gaming business apart, and in a sense, this is still the case.

With the latest update, however, Comm users can now play games with their friends – albeit no Mobage titles (so Comm still does not integrate with Mobage in any way at this point).

Instead, DeNA is calling the new in-app game service “Talk Game”. With the newest version of the app, users can play the following casino titles with each other – while they are chatting:

• Poker (up to seven people at the same time)
• Daifugo (a Japanese card game, up to six people)
• Mahjong (up to four people)

While playing, it’s possible to exchange messages and stickers within Comm (including a number of special Talk Game-related stickers, a few of which are shown below):

In fact, the communication part is essential to the gameplay and a great fit for casino games (which are being played round by round and gives people time to interact with each other). I suggest visiting Comm’s Japanese product page and have a look at the Flash animation to see a demo.

Talk Game is currently live in the Japanese version of Comm only. All games are entirely free to play.