By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
After inking a deal with SK Telecom in August last year and opening its own office in Seoul in October, GREE has made another move in South Korea: it entered a capital tie-up with Mobicle, a local developer of smartphone games. GREE bought 224,178 shares in the studio (6.8% of its outstanding stock...
CyberAgent has released a new mobile social game on iOS: as the name suggests, Ninja Farm is a Ninja-themed farming simulation. In the game, players can create their own Ninja fighters, battle other players, or choose between a total of 100 different virtual items to decorate their farms with...
Hot on the heels of the Kaixin001 deal that was inked at the end of December, DeNA has announced they teamed up with a second Chinese partner, online game provider NetDragon. The goal is to jointly develop and offer mobile social games on the Chinese market. The two companies will set up a joint...
GREE and DeNA are still growing, and with them does Japan’s social gaming industry as a whole: JP Morgan thinks so, as does Morgan Stanley, and now Yano updated their projections for the market. (Note: there are more Japanese sources with more stats, but I am not able to cover them all on...
DeNA partner Namco Bandai launched One Piece Grand Collection, a social game based on the super-popular manga and anime, on Mobage. The company is pitching the title as a social figure collection game, which features various characters from One Piece as virtual figures (see below). Not too...
After opening pre-registration back in December, Konami has launched BE-BOP-HIGHSCHOOL for Mobage on feature phones (official website). The new title is a social card battle game, in which players have to collect cards featuring characters from the 1980s high school manga the title is based on...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry