Predicting the future by studying Japan

If you want to look at where the game industry, or a particular sector of the industry, is going to be in four to five years, you can learn a lot by examining overseas markets that have had a headstart. Free-to-play PC developers, for example, would look to Korea. For mobile social game network operators and developers like Ngmoco (a subsidiary of Tokyo-based DeNA), the obvious space to study is Japan's booming mobile industry. While trying to predict the trajectory of the free-to-play mobile space, Ngmoco found that Japan's ecosystem seemed really similar to the mobile game market in the U.S., except four or five more years more advanced. One lesson Ngmoco picked up from Japan's industry is to do away with its preconceptions of the space's growth. "I think we often look at our industry as static," says Ngmoco CEO Neil Young. "We sort of assume that everything is kind of incremental, but that's really not the case when you're going through rapid and dynamic change." The studio also learned not to assume that chart position in the mobile space can tell you everything about a game's profitability -- Young notes that Ngmoco's hit title Rage of Bahamut became the number one grossing game several months ago, but it now makes two times more daily revenue today than it did back then. "Those chart positions are fungible, you know?" says Young. "They are not static. And we look at, 'Oh, number one grossing equals this number of dollars, therefore the whole market is this size.' But actually if you do something different, or you do something better, you can change those definitions." He adds, "And that's something that we've been really encouraged by -- that we're able to kind of take this 'secret knowledge from the future' and actually make it work here in the West." Ngmoco CEO Neil Young shares more about how mobile games can disrupt the console game industry and expand to a $30 billion global market in Gamasutra's latest feature.