By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
No doubt, CyberAgent’s virtual world Ameba Pigg (Ameba Pico outside Japan) is a hit: the company today announced that Piggu now counts a whopping 6 million members in Japan. CyberAgent also says it pulls in 600 million yen in revenue ($7.2 million) per month from Ameba Piggu – through...
There’s a new tech IPO in Japan: Online timetable service Ekitan (fee-based on mobile phones) will get listed in Tokyo: An online train timetable service that goes IPO? It may sound ludicrous to people living outside Japan, but Tokyo-based Ekitan is doing exactly that. The company will be...
GREE has finally announced it will enter the social gaming market in China. Tencent, the world’s third-largest web company by market cap, will be GREE’s partner. That’s a spectacular move and sign that it becomes harder and harder for GREE to expand the mobile social games...
Big news from Japan’s social gaming world today: Mixi just announced Grenge, a joint venture to be launched with CyberAgent (Ameba), to produce social games: Japan’s social apps boom isn’t ending: Today, two of the country’s biggest web companies, namely Mixi and CyberAgent, announced they...
GREE accelerates its smartphone development. The mobile social games company just announced 15 new games by third-party developers have been added to its Android/iPhone-optimized mobile website. Partners include companies like Sega, gumi and Tonchidot (full list in Japanese here). More information...
DeNA today announced it will make it possible for the 2 million users of Yahoo Mobage, its PC-based social games platform run with Yahoo Japan, to pay via online banking. The obvious goal is to remove friction for players paying real money for virtual in-game or avatar-related items (and to boost...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry