By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
I am currently attending Digital Garage‘s New Context Conference 2011 Spring in Ebisu/Tokyo, a web industry conference first started in 2006. The general topic this year: Social media played an important role in the spread of information in the current Higashi-Nihon Earthquake. Twitter and...
Earlier this week, GREE announced it has teamed up with South Asian mobile community mig33, which will adopt the GREE platform for smartphone: Big news from Asia’s social games industry today: Japanese mobile social gaming juggernaut GREE and mig33, a mobile community that’s especially popular in...
Legendary multiplayer-game Bomberman (which I played on at least 10 different video game platforms when I was younger) is now available on GREE in the form of a social game. The title, Bomberman for GREE, was announced by its maker Hudson earlier this week. As with most video game titles originally...
In December 2010, Japan-based publisher Eastpress started distributing Appli Style, the first (printed) magazine on social games in the world. And now DeNA, or rather its social games platform Mobage, gets its own magazine, too. The so- called Famitsu Mobage has 96 pages (published by Enterbrain)...
Japanese video game behemoth Namco Bandai has released Browser Quest on Yahoo Mobage, the PC-based social games platform jointly run by DeNA and Yahoo Japan. The title, an original action MMORPG actually looks quite nice and shows what’s possible on the platform. Apart from the nice looks...
Virtual worlds Ameba Piggu (Ameba Pico) or TinierMe are just two CyberAgent properties boasting a handsome number of users located outside of Japan. The third one is Poupeegirl, an avatar-based “fashion community” mainly targeted at girls. CyberAgent launched Poupeegirl in 2007 before...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry