By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
Rakuten apparently believes in the future of e-books: the company announced they have reached an agreement with Sony, Panasonic, and major book retailer Kinokuniya to cooperate in the development of an industry standard for e-books in Japan. The goal is to do away with barriers that exist between...
Nice win for GREE: The company announced that KDDI au (Japan’s second largest mobile carrier and one of the investors) will sell all Android phones with GREE Market pre-installed on the home screen. As the name suggests, GREE Market makes it possible for users to access GREE services and apps...
Following the launch in March this year, Konami’s “Professional Baseball Dream Nine” social baseball game for GREE has passed the 1 million user mark on June 7. For a few weeks in March and April, Konami boasted the No. 1 (with Dragon Collection) and No. 2 spots on GREE’s...
After turning their No. 1 social game Kaito Royale into a novel in February this year, DeNA now inked another cross-media adaptation/licensing deal with their brand: Kaito Royale is now a manga, too. The comic will be published on Young Jump (shown on the left on the picture below) and Cookie (on...
Konami landed a mega-hit on GREE with Dragon Collection, a fantasy card game that topped the GREE rankings for an unbelievable 34 consecutive weeks thus far (so much for “video game companies don’t know social”). It was just available on GREE for Japanese feature phones so far...
CyberAgent has announced the establishment of Cygames, a 100% subsidiary focused on producing apps for the PC and smartphones. There isn’t much known about the new company, but given the name, Cygames will probably create games for the platform. CyberAgent does day that Cygames is based in...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry