By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
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...
DeNA just announced the acquisition of yet another startup, social games maker Atakama Labs from Santiago, Chile. It’s the first time for DeNA to expand to South America, but Atakama also has an office in San Francisco (where ngmoco is based, too). Financial terms of the deal weren’t...
With tens of thousands of games to choose from, “discoverability” is a big problem for gaming companies offering on Facebook, in the App Store or on the Android Market. But how about Japan, on DeNA‘s Mobage or GREE? Mobage and GREE offer “only” over 1,000 games each...
Tokyo-based tech company Ubiquitous Entertainment (UEI) has secured 500 million Yen (US$6.5 million) through allocating new shares to JAFCO, one of Japan’s biggest venture capital companies. UEI is known to produce a whole range of products, i.e. smartphone apps, tablet apps, middleware, etc...
Back in April this, Capcom announced “Biohazard Outbreak Survive”, the first social game of the hit adventure/horror series Biohazard (Resident Evil outside Japan), for GREE on Japanese feature phones. The game was released in June, and now Capcom says it has 1 million registered users...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry