By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
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...
There aren’t too many action games to be found on social gaming platforms, but GREE has Destroy Gunners, a 3D action game for GREE on Android that actually looks pretty good (I myself didn’t have the time to play it yet though). In the game, players control two-legged robots, destroying...
Classic RPG series Ys gets a social make-over: GREE announced a special version, a social RPG called Ys Nexus, for their platform (the game has been jointly developed by Index and Nihon Falcom). Ys Nexus features an original story, meaning it’s not a remake of an existing Ys title (see some...
In April, French gaming giant Gameloft started offering Ecofarm, a farming simulation, on Yahoo Mobage, the PC-based social gaming platform from DeNA and Yahoo Japan. And now they launched the same title, which is available in English on Facebook (as Green Farm), on Mixi for the PC. So far so good...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry