By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
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...
Bandai Namco announced [PDF] that one of their titles on GREE, Gundam-based Sci-Fi social game Gundam Masters, has hit 1 million registered users on October 3. What’s interesting is that the game was released just on September 1, meaning it added an impressive 1,262 players per hour since...
More VC money is flowing into Japan’s social gaming sector: ONE of THEM, a mobile social games company established in Tokyo in January this year, has just raised a total of 300 million yen (US$3.9 million). The investors are Globis Capital Partners and Infinity Ventures. One of Them focuses...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry