By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
Social gaming juggernaut GREE (3632) has clearly been having trouble in recent months: the last financial quarter was pretty weak (by GREE’s standards), some once promising first-party games have been quietly closed over the summer, international business was cut down on, and the...
You could call it a clever marketing idea, total nonsense or a sign of how mature the Japanese social gaming industry is, but the day has come: Japan has a credit card that’s connected to a mobile gaming platform, as DeNA (2432) has released a Mobage credit card today. To be more precise, the...
It’s been quite a while since I last lost a word on dgame, the mobile social gaming platform NTT Docomo set up last December. But today, NTT Docomo announced a remarkable deal with Square Enix under which “Dragon Quest X for dgame” will come exclusively to the telco’s...
Five weeks ago, Japanese business daily The Nikkei ran a story according to which a total of 15 smartphone game makers in Japan are in the process of setting up a cross-promotion network. Under the service, the companies involved display ads for each other’s games, driving traffic to their...
At this year’s Tokyo Game Show, mobile game maker GungHo (3765) finally revealed a few more details about its follow-up to Puzzle & Dragons, Japan’s most popular smartphone title. And it’s not Puzzle & Dragons 2 but a completely new title called “Divine Gate”...
Tokyo-based Colopl (3668) may be a nobody outside Japan, but over here, the company has evolved into a US$2.4 billion mobile gaming powerhouse after going IPO in December 2012. US$2.4 billion in market cap is a not only a very handsome number for an almost entirely domestic company: it also means...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry