By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
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...
Social network analytics tool Socialbakers still says Facebook has 4.6 million users in Japan for some reason, but Facebook Japan itself now claims it has 5 million active users in this country (active=all users who logged in at least once in the last 30 days). TechCrunch Japan reported the newest...
First Zynga Japan shuts down 2 social games on Mixi, then Playfish/EA does the same with Restaurant City, and now it’s RockYou Asia‘s turn: American social game makers are having a hard time in Japan (hint: don’t come here if you don’t have anything unique to offer). And...
And yet another games studio gets snatched up by DeNA: today, DeNA announced it plans to acquire Punch Entertainment, a Hanoi-based game studio that’s owned by a Palo-Alto based company of the same name (website). Until now, the American HQ was responsible for design, art, engineering and QA...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry