Capcom Co. expects the proportion of its profit generated by "Smurfs' Village" and other games played on mobile phones to rise to 30 percent as users of Apple Inc.'s iPhone and Google Inc.'s Android system download the titles.
Capcom, creator of the "Resident Evil" video game series, forecast in May that cellphone games will account for 6.6 percent of its operating profit this business year. That proportion will probably increase about five-fold "in a few years," Chairman Kenzo Tsujimoto said Thursday.
Tsujimoto, 70, said purchasing Canada's Cosmic Infinity Inc., developer of the "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" handset game, in 2006 gave Osaka-based Capcom a head start in the sector. "That allowed us to wait in ambush," he said.
The company is building up its line of games played on Facebook and other social-networking sites as the sector reshapes the nation's $10.6 billion video-game market. The domestic market for social gaming will almost triple to ¥305 billion in 2013, according to Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities Co.
"The gaming population is expanding thanks to the rising popularity of applications played with smartphones," Tsujimoto said. "We hope these casual users will eventually start to play games on video-game consoles."
The company forecasts operating profit, or sales minus the cost of goods and administrative expenses, of ¥12.1 billion for this fiscal year, down 15 percent from a year earlier.
Capcom, which introduced the Beeline Interactive brand for social games this year, began last month offering the popular "Smurfs' Village," in which users cultivate land and build a town with the blue characters, to Android smartphones.