By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
One of the very, very few foreign companies doing well in Japan’s social gaming market is Rekoo Japan. Rekoo, which has offices in Beijing and Tokyo, has made a name for itself with its “Sunshine” series of social games in the past years. The company’s flagship game...
The arcade game business is way past its prime in Japan, too, but some there are still quite a few arcades and some big name makers keep making machines for them. One of these makers is Konami: the company is planning to launch “BASEBALL HEROES 2011 SHINE STAR”, a so-called...
GREE today announced it has inked a deal with Adobe to bring the new Adobe AIR 3 plugin to social game providers this fall. GREE partners can then “embed the functions provided by the GREE SDK into AIR-based applications”. Through the plugin, developers can also create multi-platform...
Yesterday, TechCrunch Japan reported about a very interesting tie-up in Japan’s Internet and mobile world: GREE is partnering up with NTT, NEC Biglobe, Septeni and Mitsubishi UFJ Capital to launch a fund targeted at early-stage startups. Japan has seen a seed accelerator/incubator bubble...
Mixi is expanding its smartphone offering. The company has announced it rolled out a Mixi application for Windows Phone, which can be downloaded for free on the marketplace. Mixi says the apps supports all handsets with Windows 7.0 on board but recommends Windows 7.5 for best performance...
Mixi has announced the acquisition of Naked Technology, a Tokyo-based mobile application development company. Naked Technology was founded in 2006 by a group of four engineers who are all graduates of the so-called MITOH program set up by the Japanese government to support outstanding engineers...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry