How to land one of the biggest fish in gaming: The story of Nintendo’s new mobile partner, DeNA

Just about everyone knows Nintendo, but what is DeNA?

DeNA (pronounced D-N-A, not Dena) is a mobile game and platform business that, up until last week, was mostly known in its home country of Japan. The Tokyo-based company owns Mobage, one of the country’s largest mobile gaming platforms, and grew its business by focusing on gaming for Japan’s feature phones first,  later moving to smartphones. It is now a major player in mobile games, a market that Newzoo says will hit $30.3 billion in 2015. It has since published hundreds of games worldwide across its three key regions: Japan, greater China (including Hong Kong and Macau), and the West, which focuses on North America and Europe.