By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
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...
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...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry