By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
I am hearing that Konami’s super hit social game Dragon Collection has been losing steam in recent weeks, but the company yesterday announced that it now counts five million players for the GREE title (feature phone and smartphone users combined). As other companies do, Konami celebrates the...
Popular social card game FIFA World Class Soccer has racked up one million registered players in just 25 days, as Japanese news site Gamebiz reports today. The title went live last month on GREE and immediately took the top spot in the platform’s popularity ranking (for a limited time). And...
GREE has been choosing between around 10 companies for deploying the collaboration tool to enable communication with and between 2,500 developers for their newly announced mobile social networking network (that’s scheduled to go live next year). Now Salesforce reports that it will provide the...
GREE is apparently killing it on smartphones, specifically on the iPhone. According to a recent statement by GREE CEO Yoshikazu Tanaka, his company’s sales coming from smartphones grew by 655% from June to October. Tanaka also mentioned one specific, very interesting data point that made...
After DeNA finally got the green light to buy professional baseball club Yokohama BayStars, the team unveiled the final name and a new logo (see below). What’s bad for DeNA is that the club isn’t called Mobage BayStars but DeNA BayStars – even though this was known before, the...
First the GREE–DeNA lawsuit, now this: Tokyo-based social game maker Klab has sued competitor Crooz for copyright infringement. Both companies are listed (Klab just went IPO in September). Klab is asking for 55 million yen (US$710,000) in damages. The company claims that Crooz infringed on...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry