By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
He kind of announced it four weeks ago, and now Rakuten president Hiroshi Mikitani has confirmed his company will enter the UK and Germany by the end of this year. Details are scarce at this point, but Mikitani did say he is looking at possible acquisitions as well as joint ventures in these (and...
Digital Garage, Twitter’s business partner in Japan (among others), has announced it will help LinkedIn enter the Japanese market. Details are scarce at this point (see below), but the partnership was actually announced four years ago. In fact, LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman has been a member of...
The Wall Street Journal Online posted an article on GREE’s CEO Yoshikazu Tanaka today. The piece offers nothing really new on the person or his company, but if you’re reading this, chances are you will find it’s well worth a quick read. It’s one of the relatively few...
Big news from DeNA today: Tomoko Namba, the founder, Representative Director, President and CEO, will be stepping down on June 25, after DeNA’s 13th annual shareholders meeting. Namba, who apparently plans to take care of a sick family member, will be replaced by the Mobage operator’s General...
Video game powerhouse Konami has added yet another social game to its line-up: Mori No Kuma House (Bear House In The Woods) was released on Mobage today, a title specifically designed for a female target audience (official website). The title is available exclusively on Mobage for Japanese feature...
Nico Nico Douga operator Dwango has decided to pull the plug on Ai Sp@ce, which is (as Wikipedia puts it) a “virtual 3D massively multiplayer online social game (MMOSG)”, on June 30, 2011. Dwango and a bunch of other Japanese companies started the virtual world in 2008 but never managed...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry