By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
Last month DeNA and Bandai Namco announced a social gaming joint venture called BDNA, which will be set up on October 3 in Tokyo. To recap, BDNA will be capitalized with 100 million yen (US$1.3 million), 75% owned by Bandai Namco, and led by a mixed team of Bandai Namco and DeNA executives. At the...
GREE announced it will bring one of China’s biggest social games, Hoolai Game‘s Hoolai Three Kingdoms, to its smartphone platform in Japan. The social war strategy game was released in Japan in late 2010, made it to the top spot in the Chinese App Store and occupied the number one slot...
Registered users≠active users≠paying users: Mixi is about to lose three social games (on its PC platform) with more than 700,000 or even one million registered players each. Apart from RockYou Asia’s Speed Racing (about 720,000 registered players on September 16), Happy Aquarium by Drecom...
That was quick: Openfeint, which was acquired by GREE in April this year, already has a new CEO. Jason Citron, the founder of the company, is out, and will be replaced by GREE CFO and CEO Of GREE International, Naoki Aoyagi. This is certainly not good news for GREE, especially with regard to their...
The Tokyo Game Show 2011 that I attended yesterday was was my 5th or 6th event, and this time, social games were as present as never before. That is, if you add GREE‘s gigantic booth (they occupied 1,080sqm or 10% of the entire floor space) to the handful (much smaller) startups that were...
DeNA has been internationalizing like there’s no tomorrow over the past months, which is probably why the company decided to completely relaunch the international website visitors to their Japanese corporate homepage are directed to (after clicking the “English” button on the top...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry