The whole point of having a social network like Mobage is to consolidate a large number of players within some sort of platform, which while expensive to operate, should enable better discovery, retention and monetisation for all the games using the platform.
We don't know how aggressively DeNA has been spending in terms of pure user acquisition.
It didn't seem to have operated at the same level as GREE and Zynga during 2012, but it would have been spending millions of dollars, especially to push Mobage-enabled games such as Rage of Bahamut.
Proof of the pudding
As the graph below shows, taking October 2012 as a base, DeNA has seen its cost of acquiring a user drop by 50 percent.
Presumably this is number calculated by combining all its user acquisition campaigns and dividing by total users acquired.
More significant, however, is the increase in new daily users the network has been generating.
Of course, DeNA could have kept its user acquisition spend at the same level since October, which giving the drop in per user cost, would have increased the number of new users anyhow.
More likely, it's seeing cross promotion between similar games such as Rage of Bahamut and Blood Brothers.
Still, the simple conclusion is a good one: drive your cost per new user down while increasing your intake. Maybe try using a platform like Mobage?
