By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
As I mentioned earlier, the LINE Games platform has been very much overrated since its launch in 2012. One of the main reasons is that most of the titles are extremely casual, and most belong to one genre: puzzle games. There has been an inflation of these “light” games (some of which...
Here is a calendar of major releases listed Japanese mobile game makers have announced for the coming months: the idea is to track what might be the next big hit in the industry from selected makers. Please note that for various reasons, I focus on native apps currently in production by publicly...
Monster Strike, the mobile action RPG that made Mixi (2121) a US$4 billion company late last month, continues to make headlines. Last week, during its earnings call, Mixi said that Monster Strike has generated about US$1 million per day in the April-June quarter. This number has grown to roughly...
Big shake-up in Japan’s gaming industry today: LINE Corp., the company behind Japan’s biggest messenger app LINE, has reached a basic agreement to form a business and capital partnership with top mobile game maker gumi, TechCrunch Japan is reporting. gumi subsidiary Alim has produced...
King is continuing to take Japan seriously, it seems. The company started running an advertising campaign on Japanese TV for Candy Crush in December 2013, before setting up King Japan in Tokyo and launching a second TV ad campaign for the same game earlier this year. The simple reason: Japan is...
Japan’s Computer Entertainment Supplier’s Association (CESA) published the s0-called 2014 CESA Games White Paper, which includes a number of interesting statistics on the status quo of this country’s gaming industry in 2013. In a nutshell, the Japanese market for consoles is...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry