By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
Canceled games, ousted star designers, exposed (bad) work conditions: Konami (9766) has not really been producing good news since it announced restructuring efforts around spring this year. And in about two weeks, starting from September 10, Konami Digital Entertainment will close a total of 31...
Japan’s top messenger app LINE (160 million users worldwide and counting) is taking it very slow with its in-app gaming platform. Even though the first LINE-powered titles were rolled out in summer last year, the total number of such games available is still below 30. LINE Corp. CEO Morikawa...
Just a few weeks after Namco Bandai went public saying they have 30 million, Konami is now boasting a total of 35 million registered users across all of their social games. The company reported 10 million users in September 2011 and 20 million in April 2012. Konami revealed that Dragon Collection...
Konami released Daifugo Monsters on dgame earlier this week, NTT Docomo’s new cross-device platform for mobile social games (whose launch turned quite a few heads last month). Gameplay is based on Daifugo, a Japanese card game that’s known as President (and under other names) in other...
In September 2010, it wasn’t a social gaming company but Konami that triggered the biggest boom in the history of this new industry (in Japan): social card battle games. The title in question is Dragon Collection, which has over 7 million players in Japan and is still doing well on GREE...
This is a critical title for GREE: Konami just released Metal Gear Solid Social Ops, the first social game in the Metal Gear franchise, on the platform. Both GREE and Konami announced the Unity 3D game during a special event in Japan at the end of August. I then had the chance to play an early...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry