By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
“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...
Nice win for DeNA today: partner Namco Bandai today announced [PDF] that it will bring two of its hit video game series to Mobage. The first game is the far more important one: “Tales Of Kizna” is the first social game in the 16-year old “Tales” series of RPGS. Kizna is a...
It seems there is still VC money available to flow into the social games market in Japan (Asia): Singapore-based social gaming startup Nubee, a subsidiary of Tokyo-based Vega, raised 1 billion yen (US$13 million) from JAFCO, TechCrunch Japan reported earlier today. JAFCO is one of Japan’s...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry