By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
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...
Big news from Japan’s search engine market: Yahoo Japan has landed a deal with Twitter that makes it possible to integrate real-time search pulled from Twitter in Yahoo Japan’s results pages. Twitter is huge in Japan, and Yahoo Japan is not only the country’s biggest website, but...
Strategy games are easy to make social by their very nature, and as such, it’s no big surprise that AQ Interactive has landed a big hit with Browser Sangokushi, a social strategy game set in ancient Japan. The game is playable on a dedicated AQ website, Mixi, and Yahoo Mobage, and now it has...
Yahoo Japan just added FashionNavi to its popular Yahoo Shopping site, a similar image search engine that’s supposed to make shopping easier and drive sales. The way it works is similar to Hitachi’s (now shut down) Gazopa: if a user needs to find another item that fits the one they are...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry