By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
GREE has announced yet another port of a hit game from a major Japanese console game maker: this time, it’s Square Enix, which started offering Chaos Rings Lite on GREE for the iPhone. The RPG was released as a standalone app on the iPhone last year and reached the No. 1 position in a total...
Japan’s e-commerce juggernaut Rakuten is active in a number of verticals, and one of them is real estate. And now Rakuten has expanded its offering on the Rakuten Real Estate sub-site drastically. First and foremost, Rakuten Real Estate has three times more condos and houses on offer than...
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...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry