By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
GREE today announced the release of a new social game called Gang Domination for their globally integrated platform, which is scheduled to launch between April and June this year. GREE partnered up with French gaming company Gameloft to develop the title, which will be released in English and Japan...
Klab acquired Tokyo-based social game maker Dream Laboratory, the company announced today. Dream Laboratory was founded in 2006, currently employs 19 people, and offers games on Mobage and Yahoo Mobage. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but given the current talent crunch in Japan’s...
Tokyo-based gloops announced they have racked up 100,000 users on Mobage for its newest social game Magigate – in just 7 hours. The biggest third-party developer on the platform released the social card battle game on February 17. The company owes this success to a number of factors, i.e. the...
GREE is currently in the spotlight in Japanese media, following reports that their top social game, Tanken Doliland, is affected by a bug that lets users copy rare cards and auction them off online to other players. For more background on this issue, see: Gree’s Tanken Doriland Bug Let Users Copy...
One of the main reasons DeNA, GREE and (some of) the 400+ third-party social game makers in Japan are raking in as much money as they do is “gacha”, a special element found in almost every social game in this country. I created a quick guide to explain the gacha phenomenon: I)...
Today is a big day for DeNA: after rolling out the awesome-looking Infinity Blade Cross on Mobage for Japanese iPhones, the company just announced the launch of Daum Mobage in South Korea. The partnership with Daum, one of Korea’s biggest web portals, was announced last November. The plan is...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry