By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
What I have always found extremely weird about Mixi was that Japan’s biggest home-grown social networking site never offered a decent chat function. For years and years, they never seemed to care. But it seems that the meteoric rise of Facebook and chat app LINE in Japan has put so much...
Konami’s biggest social game Dragon Collection is now counting 7 million registered users, the company announced today. The title is exclusively available on GREE. Dragon Collection was released on GREE on September 14, 2010, meaning it took 780 days to reach the 7 million user milestone. Dragon...
Zettai Bouei Leviathan, which roughly translates to “Total Defense Leviathan”, is the title of GREE‘s next big first-party game. Leviathan is a social card battle game set in a “parallel world” called Aquafol, which is threatened by evil aggressors. It was officially...
Following Nexon’s US$469 million acquisition of gloops earlier this month, Japan’s social gaming industry saw another spectacular exit today. GREE announced it plans to acquire Tokyo-based social game maker Pokelabo on October 30 – for a handsome US$173 million (13.8 billion yen)...
DeNA today announced it has teamed up with Yahoo Kimo to bring Mobage games to Taiwan (Yahoo Kimo is Yahoo’s brand name in that country). The company also says that it has made Mobage available in Traditional Chinese to reach users in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau. DeNA explains: As part of the...
Zynga went on a rampage yesterday and not only killed off over 100 jobs in the US but also “proposed” the closing of its offices in the UK and Japan (full story on TechCrunch). Here’s the part of the company’s official statement that’s related to Zynga’s office...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry