By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
GREE today announced it filed a lawsuit against its rival DeNA, seeking damages of at least US$13 million. Lawsuits (both corporate and private) are rare in Japan, but GREE is accusing DeNA of still putting pressure on third-party game developers and other partners to not offer games on GREE but...
The video game industry in Japan is slowly shifting towards the lucrative social games sector, and a new case in point is Samurai Spirits (Samurai Showdown outside Japan). The popular fighting game series started in 1993 on video game platform Neo Geo, and now maker SNK Playmore has rolled out the...
DeNA‘s US subsidiary ngmoco has inked a deal with Germany-based mobile company net mobile AG (Japan’s biggest telco NTT Docomo holds a 80% stake in net mobile) to help Mobage enter more countries. The German company explains: net mobile AG will help place Mobage, DeNA Group’s...
One of the biggest third-party game providers on Mobage, Tokyo-based gloops, announced that its social baseball card game on Mobage has hit 2 million registered users on November 18. “Dainekkyo!! Pro Yakyu Card” was released on August 18, meaning the game took 93 days to reach that milestone...
CyberAgent‘s super-popular virtual world Ameba Pigg continues to grow. The service counted 6 million in January (when the company said it’s making US$7.2 million in sales per month from the service), before reporting 8.5 million domestic users in September. Fast forward to today, and there...
DeNA has announced that Mobage will be pre-installed on Sharp’s next Android cell phone, the so-called AQUOS PHONE THE HYBRID 101SH. The phone is part of mobile carrier SoftBank’s fall and winter line-up this year. As you can see in the picture below, Android 2.3 is baked into a...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry