By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
It’s no exaggeration to say that the kompu gacha shock from May this year was the single biggest drawback in the history of the Japanese social gaming industry. There is a new concept to make money in Japanese social games in town, but I think it makes sense to look back at the usage of the...
Quite a few financial results from social gaming companies are due in the next days, and CyberAgent is the first company to report (for the April-June 2012 quarter). In a nutshell, sales and operating profit were up, but the Japanese web powerhouse missed expectations from analysts – and got...
As I mentioned previously, the “kompu gacha” (complete gacha) shock isn’t over, even after the Japanese government officially clamped down on the controversial game mechanic. Over the weekend, GREE, DeNA, Mixi, NHN, CyberAgent, and Dwango (the same companies that formed a...
The “kompu gacha” (complete gacha) shock has come to a temporary “official” close today: Japan’s National Consumer Affairs Agency declared [PDF] that the mechanic found in many social games on GREE and DeNA‘s Mobage platform is illegal. I am not a legal expert...
Earthquake in Japan’s social gaming industry today: a council of six major Japanese companies in this space today announced they will abolish the controversial “kompu gacha” (complete gacha) function from all of their titles by the end of May. No new games offering the mechanic...
About four years after the kompu gacha shock hit Japan’s mobile game industry hard, gacha as a monetization mechanic is in the news again. This might be over soon, and I don’t intend to discuss the ethics of gacha right now (this may come soon), but please refer to my simple primer from...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry