I always thought I have seen a lot of craziness in Japan’s mobile game industry over the last 5 years, but the Puzzle & Dragons boom in Japan is starting to scare me.
Today, at the Osaka Stock Exchange, the market cap of maker GungHo rose 19.7% to hit a staggering US$4.6 billion. That’s US$1.3 billion more than a week ago.
With US$3.3 billion, the company was already valued more than GREE (or the smaller Zynga) last week, but it seems the stock market sees even more potential because GungHo is now worth more than DeNA, too.
The Mobage operator today had a market cap of “just” US$4 billion – it was bested by GungHo for the first time today.
I am very cautious when it comes to using big words, but this is insanity: again, GungHo’s growth has one main – and one only – driver, namely Puzzle & Dragons.
The latest official statement said that Puzzle & Dragons has 9 million users, but I am pretty sure the 10-million milestone has been passed by now or will be within this week (GungHo “traditionally” needs a few days to confirm).
While the game is estimated to make a mind-blowing US$54-75 million per month, the company doesn’t have a particularly strong portfolio of mobile titles overall (even though the games are pretty awesome), doesn’t operate a platform business (like DeNA or GREE do), and it isn’t really successful outside Japan (yet) either.
