By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
CyberAgent‘s hit virtual world Ameba Pigg is seeing success outside Japan: according to Gamebusiness.jp, Ameba Pico (Pigg’s name in non-Japanese markets) just hit the 4 million user mark. The game news portal is citing CyberAgent’s official Twitter account. The super-cute virtual...
There are industry reports from a number of Japan-based investment banks available out there, and everyone sees the market size of the domestic social gaming market differently. For analysts, investors, and everyone else interested in such data, one alternative is the analysis from Enterbrain, a...
Big win for GREE today: EA Sports has brought social game FIFA World Class Soccer to GREE on Japanese feature phones and smartphones (pre-registration actually started a while ago). FIFA World Class Soccer has been co-developed with Tokyo-based gumi, one of the biggest third-party social game...
DeNA is pretty strong in securing anime-based social games for Mobage, and One Piece, announced by Bandai Namco today, might be their biggest game of that kind so far (the One Piece manga and anime are easily among the most valuable IP a company can own in these areas at the moment). The full title...
While DeNA is currently offering around 40 first-party games on Mobage, GREE has developed just around ten for its platform. For Japanese feature phones, GREE has just opened pre-registration for Bakumatsu Kingdom, a “historic” social game. Bakumatsu are the final years of the Edo...
It’s an old wisdom in the video game industry: platforms go nowhere without so-called “killer” titles. Mobage in English on Android has a few solid titles (that do well), but that killer game is missing. In the US, ngmoco is working on a bunch of new, original and Mobage exclusive...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry