By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
Online fashion mall Zozotown (background) is seeing a rapid growth in traffic, if a new report by Nielsen is to be believed. According to Nielsen Japan [PDF], Zozotown’s PC site saw a total of four million unique users, up from slightly over 2.5 million in November. Nielsen identifies three...
Japan’s No. 1 recipe site Cookpad (listed, 2193) posted its newest financial report [JP, PDF] for the third quarter of fiscal 2011, and things are looking pretty good. Sales soared 61.8% to 24.11 billion yen ($29.1 million), while net profit grew 86.2% to 722 million yen ($8.7 million)...
PC-based social games are on the rise in Japan: DeNA announced that Yahoo Mobage, the social gaming platform it operates with Yahoo Japan, now has 3 million users. It took Yahoo Mobage 51 days to get to the first million members, 53 more days to add another one million and now another 61 days to...
GREE today announced it has scored yet another exclusive social game: following Yakuza and Fist Of The North Star, Electronic Arts has chosen GREE for its first social game to be released in Japan. EA Mobile/Playfish has started offering “Minna No Sim City” (Everybody’s Sim City)...
GREE gets another dating simulation: Koi Cafe Nikki (Love Cafe Diary) is a social game designed for an “adult audience” (but does not offer sexual content). The difference to existing games in this genre is that the female players get to date grown-ups, and not, which is more commen...
Digital Garage has made an investment in an American startup again: TechCrunch reported that DG is part of a group of (star) investors who injected $1.7 million in San Francisco-based online ad startup ContextLogic. Terms of the deal, an angel investment, weren’t disclosed. ContextLogic is...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry