By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
It’s now safer than ever to call web conglomerate CyberAgent, which runs a whole range of services from online advertising to social networks and virtual worlds, “successful” in gaming, too. The Ameba operator is counting a whopping 30 million (registered) social game users across...
I always thought I have seen a lot of craziness in Japan’s mobile game industry over the last 5 years, but the Puzzle & Dragons boom in Japan is starting to scare me. Today, at the Osaka Stock Exchange, the market cap of maker GungHo rose 19.7% to hit a staggering US$4.6 billion...
In October last year, GREE took the wraps off a high-budget, next-generation social game called Zettai Bouei Leviathan (Total Defense Leviathan). Back then, I mentioned that the graphics were being created by anime studio GONZO and that the title would feature the voices of professional anime voice...
Sony sure seems to be in need of a lot of cash at the moment. In the last few days and weeks, the company sold off: the Sony Building in New York for US$1.1 billion the Sony City Osaki Building in Tokyo for US$1.2 billion and a portion of its stake in online medical service subsidiary M3 Inc. for...
GREE didn’t have a good last financial quarter, mainly because of a lack of strong games (that talk about kompu gacha shock after-effects, for example, is total nonsense). As a consequence, even Puzzle & Dragons maker GungHo is now worth more in terms of market cap. But some recent...
Japan’ social networking space has surely changed a lot in the last 2 years. There can be no doubt that chat app LINE (released in the summer of 2011) is the undisputed king in this area in Japan, boasting over 40 million domestic users. At the same time, Japan’s once biggest real...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry