By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
dotGEARS, the Vietnam-based studio behind global mega hit Flappy Bird, signed a deal with OBOKAIDEM, a game brand operated by Tokyo-based Media Kobo (3815). The announcement was made public last Friday (but has flown under the radar of English-language game media so far). Launched just last year...
US-based Niantic Labs, the Google spin-off that Nintendo (7974), The Pokemon Company and Google itself invested US$20 million in back in October, now has a presence in Japan. The company made it into the headlines in the gaming world in September as Nintendo’s chosen partner for the co...
LINE Corp. and Sega Games (6460) announced a marketing partnership for mobile games in Japan during a joint press conference yesterday. Not too surprisingly, Sega will act as the developer and publisher under the deal, while LINE Corp. will offer its messenger app as a platform for mass marketing...
While Japan does barely produce any new smartphone game developers nowadays, the number of those going public continues to rise. The latest such company to get listed at the Tokyo Stock Exchange (at the Mothers market for high-growth and emerging stocks, to be more exact) is Mynet, a developer...
The Casual Games Association gave me the opportunity to speak at its Casual Connect 2015 event, one of the biggest of its kind worldwide, in San Francisco about the topic “Cracking Japan: How Foreign Developers Can Enter The World’s Most Lucrative Mobile Games Market”. Please find...
It’s been five days since Nintendo (7974) surprised the world with further details on its smartphone plans. The news made the rounds on October 29 and shares of both Nintendo and partner DeNA (2432) have been falling in recent days, but the dust is slowly beginning to settle now. This is a...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry