Shenmue City on Mobagetown

   Sega's getting into the social networking arena with an interactive mobile phone app called Shenmue City. Sega hopes Shenmue City will serve as a way for friends to encounter and fight each other while playing a Shenmue sidestory which takes place in the city of Yokosuka. The protagonist is a student who attends Hazuki Dojo along with Ryo Hazuki and other pupils.

   In the game, players can interact with citizens of Yokosuka, work part-time jobs, practice kung-fu, run a dojo, operate an arcade, and battle other online players. The game includes 11 scenarios and will be available on the Mobagetown mobile service as well as the Yahoo Mobagetown service for PCs. In related news, Yu Suzuki recently revealed in a Famitsu interview that Shenmue 3 could become a reality.

DeNA acquires Ngmoco for $403 million

   On the heels of its acquisition of Gameview Studios (Tapfish developer) and investment in Astro Ape Studios (Office Heroes), Japanese social game developer DeNA has announced it's plans to acquire Ngmoco. All three companies that DeNA has commingled with in the past month are mobile game developers. In Ngmoco's case, they're an iPhone game developer whose offerings include "We Farm," "We Rule," and "We City."

   If you read some of the news articles covering the acquisition, the writers tout the rise of the social gaming industry and infer that the console gaming industry is on the decline. These writers seem to ape each others thoughts and sentiments because they don't really have any reasonable insight in the gaming industry.

   Here's the skinny: Free and low-cost mobile games are on the rise because the amount of mobile devices are on the rise and usage is increasing with the popularity of the iPhone and Android devices. Eventually, sales of the iPhone and Android phones will plateau and you know what these industry writers will type at that point? They'll announce the decline of mobile games. Should the economy improve at that time and console games at $60/pop begin selling like gangbusters again, these writers will tout the "Great Revival of the Console Games Industry." Yeah, they really are that simple.