By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
At a press conference in Tokyo today, Sony (6758) detailed its next attempt to move into the mobile gaming business. The big idea this time is to turn existing PlayStation IP into smartphone games, via a wholly owned subsidiary called Forwardworks. In my view, the 10 titles shown today can be...
Facebook has launched Instant Games yesterday, a new HTML5 cross-platform that could lead to a new era in gaming. In a nutshell, Facebook allows developers to deploy games that run completely within the Facebook and Messenger clients (both on mobile and desktop). One tap of the user is enough, and...
As everybody reading this text will know by now, Nintendo (7974) announced Super Mario Run for iOS earlier this week. Co-developed with partner DeNA (2432), the app is supposed to go live this December. Estimate Of Future Number Of Total Super Mario Run Downloads As Nintendo’s first actual...
In the last days, two domestic organizations have released updates on the size of the Japanese market for mobile games in 2015. I am aware that different data sources (especially across countries) rely on different methodologies, but I have not seen any numbers that are bigger than these elsewhere...
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...
Shortly after DeNA (2432) and GREE (3632) pioneered the concept of mobile gaming as the world knows it today (free-to-play business model, bite-sized content embedded in social networks to increase stickiness, data analysis to improve monetization, etc.) in 2006/2007 on feature phones, a flood of...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry