By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
GREE (3632) yesterday announced the launch of a new studio called “Wright Flyer Studios”, a separate company that was incorporated in Tokyo in February . (Wright Flyer is the name of the world’s first powered aircraft.) The studio is headed by GREE executive Eiji Araki, a member...
CyberZ, a subsidiary of Toky0-based Internet conglomerate CyberAgent (4751), released a report on the size of the Japanese market for smartphone games today. According to the report, the domestic market was worth 546.8 billion yen (US$5.4 billion) in 2013, up from roughly US$3 billion in 2012...
Mixi (2121), Japan’s once largest social network , is back from the dead. In September 2006, Mixi was the first s0-called Web 2.0 startup ever to go IPO and managed to maintain its status as a large-cap company for years until it stopped innovating and was hit by a flood of competitors:...
A lot has been written and said about the status quo and future of Nintendo (7974) , after the company reported disastrous financial results about two weeks ago: introducing its own tablet, putting a successor to the Wii U on the fast track, buying a smartphone game maker, splitting into multiple...
BDNA, the joint venture that Mobage operator DeNA (2432) and Namco Bandai (7832) launched in 2011 and that was rebranded to BNDeNA in 2012, is ending on March 31 this year. The news isn’t coming as a big surprise, for a few reasons. First, BNDeNA has released pretty solid games such as Gundam...
Tokyo-based Colopl (3668), which I recently called “the biggest mobile game maker you never heard of”, is on a roll. Colopl’s market cap currently stands at US$3.4 billion, higher than that of Zynga (ZNGA, US$3.2 billion), DeNA (2432, US$3.1 billion), or GREE (3632, US$2.3 billion). Outside...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry