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...
The Nintendo Shock: Which Predictions I Made Came True – And What’s Next?
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...
I Will Speak At “Insert Coin” In Tokyo Next Week
Next week Wednesday, the 14th “Insert Coin” is scheduled to take place in Tokyo, an event series aimed at professionals working in the Japanese game industry. The topic this time is a post mortem of this year’s Tokyo Game Show – or in other words, a (bilingual) discussion on...
Why Pokemon GO Is Big News For Nintendo
Nintendo (7974) gave a loud answer today to many people in the investor community and elsewhere who were skeptical about the company’s plans to enter the mobile market. I will not go into details of the announcement of Pokemon GO, as a lot of English-language websites already covered the news...
Japanese iOS App News Site AppBank Goes IPO
An app news site that gets listed? Japan is probably the only market in the world where this is possible, and it’s scheduled to happen on October 15. The country’s biggest such site AppBank was rumored to be an IPO candidate for quite a while now, and the eponymous startup behind it...
Why Apple Banned Mixi’s Monster Strike, Or: What Are Serial Codes?
Mixi (2121) still hasn’t given an official reason why Apple pulled its mega hit Monster Strike from the Japanese App Store over the weekend (they are not obliged to), but the answer seems to be relatively simple. As I mentioned on Saturday (the day the app went offline), the official Monster...