By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
In October last year, GREE took the wraps off a high-budget, next-generation social game called Zettai Bouei Leviathan (Total Defense Leviathan). Back then, I mentioned that the graphics were being created by anime studio GONZO and that the title would feature the voices of professional anime voice...
Sony sure seems to be in need of a lot of cash at the moment. In the last few days and weeks, the company sold off: the Sony Building in New York for US$1.1 billion the Sony City Osaki Building in Tokyo for US$1.2 billion and a portion of its stake in online medical service subsidiary M3 Inc. for...
GREE didn’t have a good last financial quarter, mainly because of a lack of strong games (that talk about kompu gacha shock after-effects, for example, is total nonsense). As a consequence, even Puzzle & Dragons maker GungHo is now worth more in terms of market cap. But some recent...
Japan’ social networking space has surely changed a lot in the last 2 years. There can be no doubt that chat app LINE (released in the summer of 2011) is the undisputed king in this area in Japan, boasting over 40 million domestic users. At the same time, Japan’s once biggest real...
Japan’s top smartphone game Puzzle & Dragons continues to amaze. I don’t want to hype the RPG/Puzzle hybrid even more here, but I do think it’s definitely noteworthy that maker GungHo’s market cap is going through the roof. To recap, I wrote four weeks ago that the...
Puzzle & Dragons, Japan’s top smartphone game, now counts 9 million users: the puzzle/RPG hybrid actually reached that milestone on February 18, just a few days after hitting 8 million downloads late last month. The chart below, compiled by Social Game Info, shows how Puzzle & Dragons grew...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry