By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
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...
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...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry