Can SNS Gaming companies in Japan survive?

Sometimes, various things evolve uniquely in Japan. SNS gaming is one of such cases. There are three SNS gaming companies in Japan, which are

1)GREE        founded in 2004, by Yoshikazu Tanaka

w/ 25M subscribers,   JPY 64.1B in revenue for 2011

2) Mobage (DeNA) founded in 1999, by Tomoko Nanba
w/ 39M  subscribers, JPY 145.7B in revenue for 2011

 

3) Mixi          founded in 1997, by Kenji Kasahara
w/ 15M (active) subscribers,   JPY 13.3B in revenue for 2011

Those three companies have grown so rapidly, doubling its revnue every year.
In particular, GREE's 3Q 2012 revenue alone exceeded the total revenue of GREE through 2011, reaching out to JPY 118.1B.

And the ingredient which enabled those SNS companies grow so rapidly is because of  the so called 'Comp. GACHA' system.

Those game companies provide card games to let the player collect the items, for instance as an adventurer in a quest something game.  About 95% users can play with no charge.  But if the player pay to collect the items, such item will help the player outdo, or make the player look more cool than other free-of-charge players.  Among those charged items, there are some really rare items that comes out randomly, which will help the player become super-strong, or super-cool.

It's like a loto. The problem is that the purchase is so easy because network carrier will invoice later with the monthly telephone charges. Therefore, it takes certain time for some heavy users to recognize how much they had to pay for to collect such rare items.  There came out so many users, mostly teenagers but even house-wives as well, who spent thousands of US dollars (actually JPY) in a month.

Then Japanese Governemnt Agency wanrned those SNS game companies that this Comp-Gacha infridges on the prohibition of Loto regurations.

Now, those SNS companies had to abondon the most profitable Gomp-Gacha system.

Some of the game development companies say they can come up with the similar system in a way that can avoid such regularions. But many believe that the growth rate of those companies have to be slow in a foreseeable future.

On the other hand, other gaming companies like Nintendo, Microsoft, or Sony whatever, is targeting SNS gamings. So the question is if those companies who lost such profitable sytem can survive in more fierce competition.

Note)
Mixi and DeNA(Mobage) are more of a Social Network company rather than a gaming company, while Mixi started gaming service since Nov. 2011 and DeNA started in 2009.
Mixi owns more sophysticated SNS platform, but their revenue still depends on the advertizement. It is obvious that whether the company suceeded to develp chargeable service, like gaming, apart from the advertizement model in early stage really differentiated later growth ratio.