The studio, which has made headlines around the globe in recent months, now boasts a market cap well in excess of Japanese giants such as DeNA on around $4.3 billion and GREE, whch sits just shy of $3 billion.
Western social gaming giant Zynga also now sits in GungHo's shadow, with a market cap of $2.6 billion.
Cause and effect
The surge seems to have been prompted by a number of GungHo announcements regarding new Puzzle & Dragons games, including a DS port and a Japan-only spin-off for iOS and Android Puzzle & Dragons Challenge.
GungHo has also just launched an English language version of Puzzle & Dragons for Android, although it is still not available in key territories such as the UK.
Despite its limited worldwide availability, however, Puzzle & Dragons is still a likely contender for the most lucrative mobile game in the world.
Puzzling
In February alone, GungHo Online grossed roughly $106 million.
Tokyo-based mobile gaming consultant Dr Serkan Toto estimates that Puzzle & Dragons generated somewhere between $62 million and $86 million of that total.
GungHo Online CEO Kazuki Morishita
And the game is attracting new players at a remarkable rate, too, reliably adding one million new users every couple of weeks. At last count, Puzzle & Dragons had more than 12 million players.
[source: Serkan Toto]
