By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
E-books are a hot topic in Japan currently: Tokyo-based market research firm Impress R&D is saying that Japan’s e-book market grew 13.2% to 65 billion yen in 2010 and projects the market to be worth 200 billion in 2015. Now it seems that Rakuten is looking to get a piece of the pie: the...
So far, Japan’s biggest social network Mixi was OK with users showing handles instead of real names on the site- and the vast majority of users has been using nick names, indeed (privacy on Japan’s web is a sensitive topic). Mixi hasn’t changed this policy, but a few days ago...
Video game maker Square Enix released another social game yesterday, a social RPG called Gleipnora. The title is exclusively available on Mobage for Japanese feature phones. In the game, players take on the rule of a newly enrolled student in a “school for magicians” called Valheriar...
Tokyo-based social gaming company Rekoo Japan (the parent company has its HQ in China) has released a new game on Mixi, dubbed “Tsukuro! Densha Town” (“Let’s build a train town”). The maker of mega hit game Sunshine Ranch is conducting some kind of “test...
CyberAgent, through its subsidiary CyberAgent Ventures (Beijing) Investment Consulting Co., made yet another investment: this time, the company acquired a 25% stake in smartphone game maker EpicForcc Entertainment. Details of the deal weren’t disclosed, but CyberAgent was apparently...
Kakaku has released traffic information on its biggest properties for June 2011, their namesake price comparison site (and Japan’s largest) and restaurant guide (and Gourmet Navigator competitor) Tabelog. And according to the report, both Kakaku and Tabelog grew significantly on a year-on...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry