By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
Japan’s biggest mobile carrier NTT Docomo has trouble attracting subscribers to BeeTV, its mobile TV broadcasting service. Growth has slowed down dramatically in recent months: Mobile TV is often cited as being a dream of the future in most markets, but it has been around in Japan, the...
DeNA just announced that it will rebrand its mobile social gaming platform Mobage-town to just “Mobage” from March 28. Mobage will also be the brand name for international markets. ngmoco’s plus+ community will be absorbed into Mobage from that day as well. At the same time, DeNA...
Did you know that GREE and DeNA spend millions of US dollars to promote their social games on Japanese TV? In the July-September 2010 quarter, for example, both companies have invested around US$35 million each in TV advertising. GREE and DeNA were practically absent from the television advertising...
Rakuten keeps hiring employees from China to drive its internationalization efforts, even though overall numbers are still low. Japan’s biggest e-commerce company added five Chinese students in fiscal 2009, another 15 more in 2010, and aims at adding an additional 15 this year. Most of...
CNET Japan wrote a pretty interesting analysis on the success of Rakuten Recipe, a recipe site Japan’s biggest e-commerce company is running. Here’s a short summary: Rakuten opened the site in October 2010. Rakuten Recipe now has 40,000 recipes and a whopping 2 million users. Yahoo...
GREE released one of its hit titles playable on Japanese feature phones, Monster Planet, as a smartphone version (Android, iPhone) earlier this week. I tried it out on the iPhone, and the port is really good. The Pokemon-like monster raising game is playable directly in the smartphone browser and...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry