Farmville invades Japan

Social network gaming company Zynga should have no problems with money and should lower their prices for their "cash" and "rp" in their games. Mobile company, SoftBank, just handed them a check for $150M (yes million), for a joint venture.

Farmville is Zynga's #1 game on Facebook (and here I thought it was Mafia Wars, no really, I did) and Zynga and SoftBank plan on bringing it to its millions of users via 3G. Not many details about the Zynga and SoftBank partnership right now. The joint venture will be Zynga Japan, and they plan on distributing Zynga's social network games all over Japan. Zynga Japan plans on targeting PC users and the mobile web.

Farmville is already available on iPhone's across America, so it's safe to say that with this joint venture, it should be available to Japan's iPhone users as well.

SoftBank (fkaVodafone) is Japan's top leading cell phone company. SoftBank has partnered with Yahoo! to bring Yahoo! services and currently have 24M active users, in which 7.6M pay for the premium services. They also are partnered with MySpace and invested $10M in USTREAM.

So expect to see the Farmville invasion to begin sometime this year or in early 2011.

I'm just waiting to see the catch on of mixi. Mixi has turned into the Japanese version of Facebook (so to say.) They have their own social network games that mimic Facebook games.

FB's Restaurant City VS mixi's My Bar:
Yes the only difference is that in mixi, you can own your own bar and serve alcohol. Everything else is exactly the same.

FB's Country Story VS mixi's Happy Farm 1&2:
Mixi has more options than Country Story.

FB's Pet Society VS mixi's Rock You:
Exactly the same, just in Japanese.

FB's FishVille VS mixi's Happy Aquarium

source: businessweek, akihabara news