Mr.Farmville

It looks like Japan’s GREE is feeling the heat from rival DeNA to break into Western markets for mobile-social gaming.

The company said today that it acquired Burlingame-based OpenFeint for $104 million, which follows on DeNA’s purchase of ngmoco:) last fall for $400 million. The idea is that together, GREE and OpenFeint will build better distribution channels for mobile game developers globally, although their solution will not be a unified global network, but rather a set of locally-targeted services.

OpenFeint provides social features for games like leaderboards and ways for players to share achievements with their friends. It says it reaches 75 million users through 5,000 games and it produced a net loss of $6.6 million through the end of the fiscal year 2010, according to financial documents accompanying the announcement. It had net sales of $282,500. Chief executive Jason Citron and the rest of the employees will stay on board with incentive packages to keep them.

From GREE’s announcement to shareholders on the acquisition:

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Source: Inside Social Games