By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
NHN Japan is continuing to turn its super-popular messenger app LINE into a platform (or portal) for mobile content of any kind. After games, a set of social networking features, horoscopes, a greeting card app, a drawing app, and a camera app, coupons, an in-app virtual world, and content for...
GREE has released Animal Days, a city-building simulation with a very high cute factor, on Android (available in English or Japanese). As the title suggests, the goal is to “build a delightful town with cheerfully funny animals”, not human beings as usual. GREE says that the initial...
Japan’s top platform-free smartphone game Puzzle & Dragons is running from one record to the other: the puzzle/RPG hybrid boasts a staggering 7 million registered users across iOS and Android now. GungHo says the number was actually reached on January 18, just a few days after announcing 6...
Chat app LINE, which just crossed the 100 million user mark, continues to impress with amazing numbers for its LINE Game platform. Operator NHN Japan today announced that tile-matching game LINE Pop hit a staggering 20 million downloads on January 16. The title was released worldwide on November 19...
Konami released Daifugo Monsters on dgame earlier this week, NTT Docomo’s new cross-device platform for mobile social games (whose launch turned quite a few heads last month). Gameplay is based on Daifugo, a Japanese card game that’s known as President (and under other names) in other...
In August last year, GREE entered a partnership with NCsoft under which the Korean company would release a social version of Lineage, its popular MMORPG, on the GREE platform. Fast forward to today, and players in Japan can now pre-register for Lineage – The Second Moon, the first mobile...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry