It’s been quite a while since I last lost a word on dgame, the mobile social gaming platform NTT Docomo set up last December.
But today, NTT Docomo announced a remarkable deal with Square Enix under which “Dragon Quest X for dgame” will come exclusively to the telco’s platform this winter.
As a reminder, dgame is a browser-based, multi-device and Japanese-only mobile gaming service that’s accessible by users of other carriers as well.
While Dragon Quest never really gained popularity in the West, games in the RPG series have been sold a total of 60 million times in Japan (since the first release in 1986 on the NES). So over here, the announcement turned many heads today.
Dragon Quest X, the title in question, is an MMORPG available for Wii and Wii U. A Windows version was just released on September 26 in Japan.
The dgame version will support smartphones as well as tablets.
And now it comes: Dragon Quest X for dgame will be streamed to a user’s device and will integrate with the console and PC versions – which is actually very, very cool (Docomo markets the port as a “cloud game”).
In other words, Docomo users can play Dragon Quest X with Wii or Windows users together, inside the same game – on the go (with modified touchscreen controls, needless to say).
What’s also interesting is that the dgame version will:
- not be made available to SoftBank or KDDI customers but only to Docomo users
- require players to pay a monthly subscription fee to Docomo in order to play the game
- be launched alongside special campaigns and offers (it will be rolled out as a pre-install on Docomo’s own dtab Tablet first)
So there you have it: the mobile version of a major console game doesn’t get ported to the 3DS or PS Vita but streamed to phones and tablets instead. I am very sure Dragon Quest X will not be the only game to get that treatment for long.
Screenshots can be found here.
