It’s no secret anymore that Konami has landed a super hit with Dragon Collection, a fantasy card collection game, on GREE. Launched in September 2010, Dragon Collection is still the No. 1 social game on GREE (followed by two other Konami titles by the way).
In fact, Dragon Collection has been occupying the top spot for a whopping 46 weeks straight. Konami is said to make US$10 million in sales with the game alone, from 3 million registered users: on one platform (GREE) only, in one country only, and on mobile only.
After winning a “GREE Award” in February this year and pushing out an Android version, Konami announced Dragon Collection will be turned into a manga, too. Dragon Collection as a comic will appear as early as tomorrow (August 31) in Japanese stores.
Konami says they created the manga, which will be printed in Japan’s most popular weekly manga magazine Shonen Magazine, in-house. What’s also interesting is that tomorrow, Konami will kick off a campaign under which players can use QR codes they can find on a total of five manga magazines to obtain limited-edition dragon cards.
DeNA has turned their hit social game Kaito Royal into a manga earlier this year.
Konami also tied up with major Japanese convenience store operator Lawson and beverage company Suntory: buyers of coffee cans of Suntory brand BOSS can win special Dragon Collection-related prizes, for example figures or rare monsters winners can use in the game.
Lawson currently has close to 9,000 convenience stores in Japan and runs ads for the game in stores, too (I myself have seen Dragon Collection “commercials” on the screens on the back of Lawson cash registers multiple times over the last days).
