By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
Are DeNA and Konami getting friendlier with each other? After releasing GREE top hit Professional Baseball Nine on Mobage, Konami now launched another social game on the DeNA platform. Busou Shinki BATTLE Communication is a social RPG set in the near future. Players have to clear missions, level up...
DeNA‘s American subsidiary ngmoco has announced that Mobage in English (in other words, the Android app) is now out of beta. For some reason, the press release isn’t making something very important clear: the Mobage-enabled games that have been released so far are now...
In their latest financial report, Mixi didn’t only report numbers but also announced a major overhaul of its app platform for November 15. It’s the most radical revamp of that section ever and is likely to benefit social game makers. The basic idea is to split the apps section into two...
DeNA is buying Yokohama-based pro baseball team BayStars, after all. Pending approval (see below), the Mobage company will acquire a 66.92% Yokohama BayStars Baseball Club, Inc. for 6.5 billion yen (US$83.2 million). DeNA’s global PR office has sent the following (unofficial) summary of the...
Mixi has released the financial report for the second quarter of fiscal 2011 (July to September), and in a nutshell, things aren’t looking too good for Japan’s biggest social network: while sales have slightly (1.8%) risen to US$39.66 million, operating profit fell 16.8% to US$6.54...
Mixi has announced it acquired Kanagawa-based smartphone development company Conit for an undisclosed sum. Conit, which was established in 2008, started making games for various platforms (iOS, GREE, Mobage, etc.) before moving towards B2B products, i.e. smartphone billing solutions. The company...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry