By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
Nice win for DeNA today: “Professor Layton”, a mega hit video game, will be turned into a social game and published exclusively on Mobage this fall. Made by Fukuoka-based Level-5, the adventure game series sold a total of 12 million units worldwide so far. The social game, dubbed...
Roughly 25 of the 30 billion or so page views Japan’s biggest social network Mixi is seeing per month come from mobile phones, meaning it’s not a big surprise that today Mixi announced it will revamp the feature phone version of its service on June 22. The company says the new design is...
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...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry