By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
GREE has announced it bought a 8.3% stake in Mind Palette, a Tokyo-based startup that was established just in November 2010 (and is backed by CyberAgent Ventures). Mind Palette is focusing on one product at the moment: Snapeee, a picture-based social network that lets users add cute and funny...
Mega-popular Japanese girl group AKB48 is getting a social game: GREE announced that the 48 members of the band will be the main characters in a social card game that will be released on October 25 on GREE for Japanese feature phones. The title, dubbed AKB48 Stage Fighter, will offer 48 different...
Japanese video game makers are increasingly going social games, and Capcom hasn’t been an exception. It’s the maker that boasts the most international exposure in the mobile (social) gaming field, thanks to titles like Smurf’s Village and others. In an interview with Bloomberg...
GREE is again preparing to take legal action against DeNA, following a lawsuit from September 2009 (when GREE accused its competitor of copying one of their hit games). This time, GREE says DeNA is blocking access to games made by third-party developers. The accusation isn’t really new: in...
What do you do when you’re a Japanese social game company with 30 million users, have been running TV ads for years, sit on US$728 million pre-tax profit from last fiscal and need to widen your member base? You try to buy a pro baseball team, just like DeNA. The Nikkei reported Tuesday that...
Walt Disney Japan has seen some decent success after launching their first social game, Disney My Land, on Mobage in April this year (the title has constantly been on Mobage‘s top 20 games since). In case you didn’t know, Disney has huge brand power in Japan. While the theme park...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry