This latest piece of news in a way reminds me of Osmos. ngmoco for quite some time now has been buying companies. Freeverse was the latest, and today, it was announced that they themselves have been acquired by DeNA:

DeNA, the Japanese social game giant, said Tuesday that it would acquire Ngmoco, a Silicon Valley iPhone game developer, for $400 million.

DeNA acquires many of ngmoco’s existing games ranging from We Farm to Coin Push Frenzy . Most importantly however, the Japanese social gaming company will be acquring ngmoco’s very own Plus+ network.

Adding Android Into The Mix

In a post on ngmoco’s official blog, the founders relayed what this means for the company:

ngmoco will lead DeNA’s efforts in the Western world, including launching a new western smartphone version of the incredibly successful Social Games Network, Mobage (we say “Mo-ba-gae”) that we’re building together with DeNA.

In addition, they’re starting a new SDK called Open Mobage which will open up the platform to other smartphones like Androids, and maybe even Windows Phone 7.

We’re going to be opening up our platforms and frameworks, allowing them to access both the technologies and traffic that power ngmoco & DeNA products globally. By integrating the native libraries and technologies that power our leading ngmoco family of games & our plus+ network with the Mobage SDK, we’ll create the Open Mobage Smartphone SDK. Developers who target this platform will gain access to the APIs, Libraries & Services that power the leading smartphone games, effortlessly bring their applications to both iOS & Android and get immediate access to a community of tens of millions of users both here in the West and Japan.

ngmoco promises  that this won’t mean they’re attention will gear away from the iOS. Of course it’d be a silly move to begin with, since ngmoco is making a killing on their social games, but it’s still good to personally hear this from them.

It sounds like this won’t be much of a difference for the iPhone world. Let’s hope it stays this way for the long run.