By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
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...
Capcom has released “Everybody’s Onimusha Card Master” (Minna To Onimusha Card Master) on Mobage in Japan, the first mobile social game in the 11-year old Onimusha franchise. With the exception of “Onimusha Soul”, the latest entry in the series (a browser-based RPG for...
Sega’s popular mecha fighting game for arcades “Border Break” is finally coming to the home: the company started talking about a mobile version late last year, and I was just one of many people who got very excited about the prospect of playing Border Break online on a smartphone...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry