By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
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...
The Japan Fair Trade Commission (JFTC) has issued a cease and desist order to DeNA, following claims in December last year that DeNA was breaking the country’s antitrust law. The JFTC states: DeNA forced “Specified Social Game Developers” not to provide the games through “GREE”, by...
GREE has rolled out a native application for Monster Planet, its hit monster breeding game, for iOS. The game is basically the same as the feature phone version, but MonPla on the iPhone looks just much, much better. The title is only available in the Japanese App Store (download) at this point...
DeNA has announced they have partnered up with Tokyo-based anime production company Aniplex to bring social games based on anime titles from the Aniplex catalog to Mobage users. The first title to be turned into a Mobage game is Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, an anime series that’s based...
What does GREE CEO Yoshikazu Tanaka think about his company and Japan’s chances of a recovery after the triple disasters that hit this country on March 11? NHK World recently aired an interview with Tanaka (in English), and you can watch it here (sorry, it’s not embeddable). He’s...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry