By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
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...
“Dainekkyo!! Pro Yakyu Card”, a social baseball card game made by Tokyo-based social game maker GMS (recently named gloops), now has 1.5 million registered users on Mobage. The English title of the game is “Japan Pro Baseball Card Battle”. It’s available on both Mobage for feature...
Japan’s biggest home-grown video sharing service and community Nico Nico Douga has gone HTML5, at least on Safari for the iPhone and iPod touch. While the main site still uses Flash on the PC to display videos, iOS users can now view clips directly on their browser. In other words, it’s...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry