By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
As everybody reading this text will know by now, Nintendo (7974) announced Super Mario Run for iOS earlier this week. Co-developed with partner DeNA (2432), the app is supposed to go live this December. Estimate Of Future Number Of Total Super Mario Run Downloads As Nintendo’s first actual...
In the last days, two domestic organizations have released updates on the size of the Japanese market for mobile games in 2015. I am aware that different data sources (especially across countries) rely on different methodologies, but I have not seen any numbers that are bigger than these elsewhere...
About four years after the kompu gacha shock hit Japan’s mobile game industry hard, gacha as a monetization mechanic is in the news again. This might be over soon, and I don’t intend to discuss the ethics of gacha right now (this may come soon), but please refer to my simple primer from...
Shortly after DeNA (2432) and GREE (3632) pioneered the concept of mobile gaming as the world knows it today (free-to-play business model, bite-sized content embedded in social networks to increase stickiness, data analysis to improve monetization, etc.) in 2006/2007 on feature phones, a flood of...
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...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry