By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
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...
It took them a while, but now social networking analytics service Socialbakers is also saying Facebook has hit the 5 million user mark in Japan (5,035,460, to be exact). What’s noteworthy here is that the site didn’t update the number for Japan for over 2 weeks (it was stuck at 4.8...
Japan’s social gaming industry is maturing and continues to mix with the video gaming sector: Sega has announced it has entered a capital tie-up and that it will jointly develop social games with Tokyo-based startup Pokelabo. Details are scarce (financials, for example, weren’t...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry