In this case, you had an established Japanese company that operated a very successful feature phone social platform combining with a small, aggressive, venture-backed San Francisco start up game developer.
Yet, two and a half years - and several reorganisations - later, it looks like DeNA's money wasn't wasted after all.
Collecting cards
Of course, it still generates a lot of its money from Japanese feature phone users. Revenue from Japanese smartphone users only overtook this in September 2012.
Yet, what's more important is DeNA is now generating sizeable revenues internationally.
Thanks to the success of titles such as Rage of Bahamut, MARVEL: War of Heroes and Blood Brothers - a title we recently considered in our Charticle feature - it made almost $70 million between January and March 2013 (its Q4).
DeNA hasn't broken out the figures formally, but as the graph below shows revenue from its international operations was around $160 million in FY12.
That's about 8 percent of its total revenue.
And consumption of the platform's MobaCoin virtual currency is predicted to be $90 million in the next quarter.
That's why says it plans to "turn Mobage West into a profitable operation during the summer".
[source: DeNA (PDF)]
