By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
DeNA is making another push into China: the Mobage operator announced that DeNA China and China’s biggest search engine company Baidu have partnered up to bring Mobage games to Baidu’s mobile app store. The so-called Yi Store is pre-installed on smartphones using Baidu’s Yi mobile...
I had the pleasure of taking part at Penn Olson‘s Startups In Asia conference in Singapore last week. Here is a summary of the coffee chat with me, here’s the summary of the panel discussion I moderated. Just to clarify: I was referring to the business model of social gaming in Japan as...
Sangokushi Kingdom, a social card battle game (again), racked up a total of 200,000 registered users on GREE. The first-party game was launched on GREE for feature phones in September 2011, when the company was exhibiting at the Tokyo Game Show. In the “historic” social game, players...
As expected, DeNA is striking back in the ongoing lawsuit with GREE: to recap, in November 2011 GREE sued their rival, seeking damages of US$13 million. In the lawsuit, GREE stated that DeNA has been pressuring third-party game developers in Japan into exclusively offering social games...
Today is my last day as staff writer for TechCrunch.com. Thank you to everybody at TechCrunch, first and foremost Michael Arrington (now a venture capitalist), Erick Schonfeld (now editor-in-chief), and John Biggs (editor of TechCrunch Gadgets) for the last four years. I also thank the people at...
I have listed up several stats from several sources trying to size up Japan’s social gaming market in recent months (see below). The Nomura Research Institute says that Japan’s social gaming market will likely be worth 393.5 billion yen (US$5.1 billion) in fiscal 2016, roughly doubling...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry