By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
CyberAgent is counting 8 million users in its virtual world Ameba Pigg (latest stat available, for June 12), and the company is now stepping up efforts to add more and more features to it. Apart from linking social games from the company’s catalog to Ameba Pigg, another way is to integrate...
CyberAgent has announced it started offering its hit game Twinkle Bar on Mixi Touch (the smartphone browser version of Mixi) and Ameba Mobile. The title, a bar management simulation, has racked up 2 million users on Mixi Mobile (Mixi on feature phones) in about a year. On Ameba Mobile (Ameba on...
GREE has announced its line-up of Unity-powered iOS and Android social games for this summer (in Japan). In March this year, GREE partnered up with the 3D games tool development maker to make the Unity plug-in part of the GREE SDK. Personally, I am a big fan of what Unity is doing (Gamasutra just...
I will be in the US (namely San Francisco and LA) for a few days next month to visit various companies and do other things. By coincidence, the JETRO (Japan External Trade Organization) will be holding an interesting event during that time, on July 29, in San Francisco: Social Networks and Casual...
According to an email I received today from Mixi (they didn’t post the information on their website for some reason), the NIKEiD social banner ad campaign they started earlier this month on their site worked. Does this pave the way to another channel of monetization for Japan’s biggest...
Rakuten is continuing its aggressive internationalization: the company today created a special section on Thailand’s leading e-commerce site, TARAD.com (which Rakuten took over in 2009), that allows Japanese users to buy Thai products – in Japanese, directly from Thailand-based merchants...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry