Last week, a largely unknown Japanese game studio quietly announced a partnership with Flappy Bird developer Dong Nyugen and his DotGears startup. It wasn’t until earlier this week when Kantan Games’ Serkan Toto posted about the potentially huge collaboration that it landed on our radar.
Tokyo-based Obokaidem, the mobile gaming division of internet services company Media Kobo, will co-develop an unspecified number of smartphone titles through the exclusive deal with Dong Nyugen in 2016. The first, N Project, will be a “ninja game” according to DotGears’ Facebook page. The announcement included an early screenshot of the apparently still-in-development game (see above)
It’s hard to discern the genre from the image alone, but the artwork and characters appear to be straight out of Swing Copters 2, the sequel to DotGears’ Flappy Bird follow-up.
Vietnam-based Dong, who shot to international fame after Flappy Bird obsession gripped the world in 2014, declined to share further details about the partnership.
“We would like to keep our collaboration staying quiet [until] we are ready,” he told Tech in Asia via email. “I’ll hold the answers until then.”
According to Serkan, Dong was “bombarded” with offers to join game studios from around the world in the wake of Flappy Bird’s success, which he ignored before going silent on social media. It’s unclear why he chose Obokaidem over more well-known firms, both in Japan and internationally. Companies like DeNA, Mixi, and GungHo spring to mind as household names in Japan’s mobile gaming market, but it’s also not clear if they made any attempts to reach out to Dong in the first place.
According to its English website, Obokaidem has released a handful of titles thus far: Boost Beast, a block matching game; Green the Planet, an asteroid shooter; and Pick-Xell, where you play as a digging robot. With the exception of Boost Beast, the other two use cute pixel art similar to the preferred style of DotGears.
Dong famously removed his breakout hit from app stores despite it earning him US$50,000 a day because he was worried that it had become an “addictive product.”
With a new business partner, creating mobile gamers’ next fix is likely a high priority.
Source: Kantan Games CEO blog
Editing by Judith Balea
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