By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
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...
I received the confirmation that I will be delivering the keynote presentation for the SparxUp Awards 2011, a web and mobile startup event to be held in Jakarta, Indonesia on October 21, 2011. My topic will be “Innovation, Imitation and Hyper-Localization”. The event will be held in the...
I have been preaching for months that Japan’s social gaming giants DeNA and GREE will have a hard time replicating their enormous success outside Japan, and now JP Morgan in Tokyo has released a report pointing out the trouble that DeNA in particular is seeing currently. To be more specific...
Facebook still has no iPad app, but Mixi now does: the company today announced that Mixi for iPad just hit the App Store. I just downloaded the app (for free) from the Japanese App Store (link) and gave it a spin. The app looks fine, allows access to all of Mixi’s main functions and is...
DeNA just announced that MapleStory, the super hit MMORPG from Korean publisher Nexon, is now available on Mobage in the form of a mobile social game. The Mobage version, dubbed MapleStory: Bokura No Boken (“Our Adventures”), is playable on Mobage for Japanese feature phones only at this point...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry