By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
As a legacy of the feature phone era (which is not yet over), Japan is the only country in the world in which millions of people play games inside their smartphone browser – mostly on the GREE (3632) and DeNA (2432)-operated Mobage platforms. Devs over here are slowly but surely shifting to...
US-based Pocket Gems has entered a partnership with GMO Gamecenter, Inc., a subsidiary of Japanese Internet powerhouse GMO Group (9449). The “America connection” here is that GMO Gamecenter in the US has been running the English-language Android game platform G-Gee since 2011 (there is...
Investors in stock from publicly traded Japanese mobile gaming companies need nerves of steel, especially right now. Case in point: KLab (3656), the Tokyo-based mobile game maker that’s known outside Japan for its card battler “Lord Of The Dragons”. The company had a number of...
Last year in September, during the Tokyo Game Show 2012, GREE (3632) took the wraps off “Project Fantasm:A”, a new first-party title with some pretty high-profile names behind it. GREE didn’t talk much about their “AAA” social game since but fast forward to today, and it’s...
Last month, Capcom (9697) announced a mobile spin-off of its popular action RPG Dragon’s Dogma for the Playstation Vita. Dubbed Dragon’s Dogma Quest, the game is scheduled for release later this year in the form of a F2P and online-only variation of the PlayStation 3 / Xbox 360 hit...
Just last week The Nikkei reported about sales and profit sliding significantly for GREE (3632) between April to June (ahead of the company’s official announcement of its financial results for that quarter). Back then, Japan’s biggest business publication reported that – as a...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry