By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
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...
In September 2010, it wasn’t a social gaming company but Konami that triggered the biggest boom in the history of this new industry (in Japan): social card battle games. The title in question is Dragon Collection, which has over 7 million players in Japan and is still doing well on GREE...
DeNA has partnered up with Nexon to distribute the Korean company’s mobile social games on the Mobage platform, both in Japan and abroad. DeNA’s official statement suggests that this “global business alliance” will be pretty extensive: Nexon and its subsidiaries NEXON Korea...
It took NHN Japan a bit longer than they wanted, but today it happened: super-popular messenger app LINE has passed the 100 million user mark (the original plan was to get there by the end of last year). The company was very clever in initiating a countdown marketing/PR campaign earlier this week...
AKB48 Stage Fighter, the first social game featuring Japanese girl group sensation AKB48 was released on GREE in October 2011 and went on to, partly fueled by TV advertising, become a big hit (it’s still popular today). And today Bandai Namco released the second AKB48-themed social game on...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry