By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
GREE is on a roll today: following the relatively big news that the company invested $25 million in a fund to support early-stage Android developers, this news is even bigger. GREE today acquired iOS and Android social platform OpenFeint for $104 million. Here is GREE’s press release in...
TechCrunch today has an article on a newly set up (and pretty spectacular) fund that will support early-stage Android developers. The so-called A-Fund is worth $100 million and aims at the Asian market in particular. GREE is a part of it, as is KDDI and Tencent, but the fund is actually being led...
It took Dwango years to release Nico Nico Douga in English, and after they finally did today, all I can say is that it is hugely disappointing, even for a beta release. Dubbed Nico Nico (Dwango dropped the “Douga”, which is Japanese for movies), the site, in its current form, looks more...
Announced last month, available today: GREE finally released Tecmo Koei’s 100 Man Shin Sangoku Musou, a social game that mixes action with tactical elements. The title is a standalone/original game, but GREE says if owners of the PS3 version use a serial to be found inside the game’s...
Nikkei Trendy Net posted a pretty interesting 7-page interview with GREE‘s CEO Yoshikazu Tanaka earlier this week (the headline says that social games could become Japan’s next export hit). Here’s a rough summary of what he said in English (the interview is in Japanese only, of...
Something that I think not too many people are aware of: DeNA placed this ad for Mobage on the back cover of Famitsu Mobage, the printed magazine that was released in Japan a few days ago. DeNA plans to launch a rebranded version of its social games platform for smartphones this spring – not...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry