By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
Both DeNA (Mobage) and GREE had tremendous success in attracting users via TV commercial campaigns, and now Dwango is trying to do copy this formula with popular video sharing service Nico Nico Douga. Here are some of the TV commercials, for which Dwango hired J-Pop mega-star Gackt (and which are...
In December 2010, DeNA announced a spectacular deal with Samsung under which the handset maker will pre-install DeNA’s mobile social gaming platform Mobage on its Android phones. Today, Japanese news site Keitai Watch has pictures that show how Mobage will be presented to end users of Samsung...
Yahoo Mobage, Yahoo Japan’s and DeNA’s social game platform on the PC, gets a new hit title from Tecmo Koei. Players wanting to register for an early version of “Nobunyaga No Yabou” (Nobunyaga’s Ambition”, a war simulation game), could do so today. However...
Should Yahoo sell its 34.78% stake in Yahoo Japan? The question has been asked for several years now if Yahoo Japan (founded in 1996) should become more independent of its US counterpart. SoftBank owns more than Yahoo itself (37.36%). Yahoo Japan is currently worth $21.5 billion at the Tokyo Stock...
It took a while, but according to The Nikkei, Google Japan is finally introducing TrueView ads on the Japanese version of YouTube. TrueView lets viewers on YouTube decide over which ads they want to watch or ignore. The obvious goal here is to get new advertisers and establish a new revenue stream...
Japan’s No. 1 mobile carrier, NTT Docomo, opened a feature-phone only “app store” on December 6, 2010. The portal started with 1,200 apps, one million music titles and a total of 30,000 e-books, with all content exclusively for download onto Docomo’s feature phones. Docomo gets...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry