By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
This isn’t a big surprise actually: LINE operator NHN Japan just announced that puzzle game LINE Pop racked up 3 million downloads across iOS and Android and worldwide – in 24 hours. LINE Pop is one of the second batch of games using the platform’s social features and distribution...
The Nikkei recently ran an article in which Japan’s biggest business daily compared the operating profits of DeNA and GREE in a handy chart. The newspaper looked back at every quarter since July-September 2010, as both companies reported numbers for the last financial quarter (DeNA, GREE) a...
It’s a mystery to me why GREE, which has offices around the world and has no problem calling itself global, waited to publish its new financial report in English today – six days after releasing the original on November 14. There must be some “political” or PR/IR reasons for...
Square Enix announced “Chocobo No Chocotto Nouen”, a farming simulation that will be available on GREE for feature phones and smartphones by year-end. The biggest bullet point here is that the game uses Chocobo, a large bird that regularly appears in Final Fantasy RPGs (since the 1980s)...
LINE operator NHN Japan has been extremely slow in rolling out social games for their hyper-popular chat app (75 million downloads and counting), but the second wave of games is finally ready. All of these games run on the LINE Game platform and let users connect with each other. They follow LINE...
Legend of the Cryptids and Monster Maestro maker Applibot has released its third social game outside the Japanese market. Dubbed “Galaxy Saga”, the title is now available in English on the App Store. Just like the first two social games, Galaxy Saga is a F2P platform-free card battler...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry