By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
Facebook Japan still has one or two things to learn about the local social media scene, it seems. Tokyo-based tech blog Asiajin (I am a writer) is reporting that a few decisions made by Facebook leave the Japanese confused about the company’s terms of use. Facebook is trying to enforce the...
Mixi caused a splash last month, when it announced its decision to change its role from a “pure” social network provider to social network and social game provider (at least to some extent). It chose CyberAgent as a partner in a joint venture that will exclusively produce social apps...
What percentage of sales are DeNA (Mobage) and GREE generating through sales coming from their own games as opposed to those from third-party game providers? That’s a question I get asked regularly. Both DeNA and GREE publicly break down how much they are making through ads as opposed to...
Not only GREE, but also CyberAgent is aggressively hiring people at the moment, if a report by The Nikkei Marketing Journal (February 18 edition) is to be believed. The paper says that the Ameba provider wants to have 500 engineers (programmers) in its workforce by September 2012, up from the 200...
GREE offers over 500 social games at the moment, and DeNA‘s Mobage platform even is on the way to 1,000 titles. A reason for the rapid growth both platforms have been seeing in recent months is that more and more “traditional” Japanese video game makers are starting to develop...
I regularly get asked how big Japan’s market for social games (deployed on GREE, Mobage, Mixi etc.) actually is. The short answer is it depends on who you ask – and you should be careful which numbers to rely on. Let’s just look at 3 sources: 1) Japanese government In July last...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry