By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
Major Japanese video game maker Square Enix announced (and already released) Traveling Fairy today, a new fantasy adventure for Mobage for feature phones. As you would expect from Square Enix, the social game looks pretty slick. Traveling Fairy contains location-based elements and lets the player...
NHK, Japan’s only public TV broadcaster, has started airing Connect earlier this week, a new TV show covering the latest news and trends in tech. The show naturally has a website on NHK Online, and I am lucky to be one of the columnists for Connect’s dedicated blog for the show. Here is...
CyberAgent quietly inked deal with Disney Japan to license some characters for Ameba Pigg (Ameba Pico outside Japan), CyberAgent’s wildly successful virtual world. To be more specific, CyberAgent created a “Disney Town” within Ameba Pigg, which looks like this (pictures via...
DeNA and CyberAgent today announced they will jointly launch an ad network specifically for the smartphone versions of Mobage (DeNA’s mobile social game platform) and Ameba (CyberAgent’s blogging and social networking platform). It’s one of the biggest alliances in Japan’s...
Another sign that Facebook Japan is becoming more and more visible: Tokyo-based Internet company GMO has raised (via their investment subsidiary GMO Venture Partners) a fund exclusively for startups working on e-commerce solutions on Facebook (“F-Commerce”). Initially, GMO is ready to...
Cell phone novels have been big in Japan for years, and GREE now has a dating simulation that’s been jointly developed by Tokyo-based social game maker Mobile Factory and Mahou no i-rando, a major Japanese cell phone novel site. Dubbed Watashi Senzoku, the game is mainly targeted at girls who...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry