Nijibox: From a Recruit Spinoff to a Rapidly Expanding Gaming Company

Readers may remember that we recently featured Nijibox (nijibox.jp), a Japanese game developer whose Costume Fantasia title has recently been pushed to Southeast Asia via the mig33 platform. The company was founded in 2010 and currently has 125 employees at its headquarters in Tokyo. Interestingly Nijibox is owned by Japanese human resource giant Recruit, and I confess I was a little curious to learn how a company like Recruit could spawn a gaming company. I had a chance to visit Nijibox recently to find out more.

The founder of Nijibox is Yoichi Aso, who worked with Recruit in advertising from 2006 to 2008. But back when companies like Mixi, GREE, and DeNA were getting into mobile, he thought it might be a promising new business opportunity for Recruit as well. He proposed his ideas as a part of Recruit’s internal ‘New Ring’ system, which the company uses to source new ideas from its employees.

Yoichi Aso, Nijibox

Recruit subsequently invested some capital and Yoicho and a small team began to develop mobile services under the name of ‘Media Technology Labs,’ a sort of internet R&D group under the Recruit umbrella. They would launch more than 30 mobile information services as part of that project.

In November of 2010 Nijibox was founded, as Recruit decided to invest in the mobile social application market. As GREE and Mobage opened their platforms to third party developers, Nijibox launched several titles in its first year, including Serukira, Band Stadium, and TV Battler. In just a few years since it began, Nijibox has already released 237 titles, which Yoichi claims makes them one of the most prolific developers in Japan.

Nijibox’s development process, as I understand it, is very modular, which means that many of the same core building blocks can be applied to many of their games. Overall now, their games account for more than five million active users in total. In total, the company currently develops for about 25 different social game platforms, including GREE, Mobage, Hangame, iOS, Android, and Facebook.

In addition to Indonesia, Nijibox is now looking to expand to other Asian countries as well, including Korea, Malaysia, and China. Its new title Conquista Fantasia (not to be confused with Costume Fantasia) was released for Android just last month (see screenshots below). And for China, the company will team up with Shanda Interactive as its localizing partner for its Conquista Fantasia title for iOS, which is expected to be released soon.