Tokyo-based market research company looops is running a regular web TV show that focuses on different topics of Japan’s web industry each time. The show yesterday was about “the future of social games” in Japan and elsewhere.
During the show, looops employee Kensuke Komura pulled up two slides to highlight which genres currently dominate the social gaming market in Japan: titles that are based on IP (manga, anime, TV shows, etc.) and social card battle games.
I am sorry for the blurry screenshots, but the following slide at least shows how many IP-based games can be found in GREE‘s top 20 ranking (on the left) and Mobage (on the right) in “heat map” style.
You can see that 7 of the GREE top 20, and 8 of the Mobage top 20 were using existing IP at the end of December/beginning of January:
The situation is even more radical in terms of social card battle games like Konami’s Dragon Collection or GREE’s insanely popular doliland.
14 of GREE’s top 20, and 10 of Mobage’s top 20 were social card battle games at the end of November/beginning of December last year. On GREE’s side, the first five titles are all social card battle games:
The looops show (entirely in Japanese) about social gaming in Japan can be watched as a recording here.
