By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
It’s no secret that DeNA’s self-developed hit social game Kaitou Royal is the company’s main money maker. Now DeNA is planning to further monetize the Mobage title by turning it into a serialized manga and novel. DeNA has already started publishing the digital versions of the...
Japan’s telecommunications giant SoftBank has partnered up with China Mobile, Bharti Airtel (India) and Vodafone on Monday to set up the so-called “Global TD-LTE Initiative”. The goal here is to reduce development costs for TD-LTE-based mobile software and hardware by streamlining...
A question I often get asked in the scope of my consulting work is: how many users do you think GREE can get at the maximum? Today, during a social media event in Tokyo, GREE executive Naoya Ito (background) says GREE is aiming for 100 million members. Ito went on saying that this Zynga-esque...
Japanese Groupon clone Luxa has today issued a report that sheds a light on the combined revenue Groupon and its 190 clones generate in Japan. Luxa began tracking data in April 2010 (when Piku, Japan’s first Groupon clone, launched). According to this data, sales grew steadily after April...
Rakuten announced they inked a deal with Disney Japan to set up a special online shop on Rakuten Ichiba. The so-called Disney Store will offer Disney-related goods to the site’s 70 million members. For Disney, Japan is one of the world’s biggest markets. The company operates 47 brick...
How many smartphones are there in Japan, who is offering them and what are the specs? The following site provides a good, up-to-date overview of the smartphone situation in this country. The site shows that Android is rapidly popularity in Japan: Link (Japanese only) Link (same site, under Google...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry