By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
After having established a mobile social gaming platform called “dgame” in Japan, the country’s top carrier Docomo is now ready to bring it to China. dgame went live in Japan in December last year on smartphones and feature phones (through the browser). Back then already, Docomo...
This is big: Japanese telecommunications giant SoftBank (the one that acquired Sprint in the US) will launch a tender offer to increase its stake in GungHo Online Entertainment between April 1 and 26 this year (GungHo will conduct a 10-for-1 share split on April 1). GungHo has produced Puzzle &...
In Japan, a title called “Kaito Royale” is often credited with having kick-started the social gaming boom in this country as a whole. The first-party game – which works much like Mafia Wars – from DeNA was launched on Mobage in October 2009, and is still very, very popular...
GREE continues to step on the gas: after securing a number of promising games, announcing a partnership with Yahoo, and expanding its merchandising business, the company today said it entered a joint venture with Ameba operator CyberAgent. This is remarkable, as a) CyberAgent is a top provider of...
Growth in Japan’s social gaming market is starting to slow down, competition is increasing, and internationalization isn’t going as well as expected. So what can you do as a mobile game platform provider? While Mobage operator DeNA continues to do m-commerce and started branching out...
As a Japanese game developer, how do you stand out of the crowd of thousands of titles available on Mobage, GREE, iOS and Android? A lot of companies over here, especially the ones with deep pockets, have answered this question with “by using popular IP” in recent years. That IP has...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry