By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
GREE is expanding its business from social games to online ads. The company just acquired Tokyo-based ad exchange service Atlantis for $26 million. The company will be turned into a 100% GREE subsidiary. Atlantis was founded in 2007 and has a 15-people team. With the acquisition, GREE wants to...
DeNA today announced a new way to monetize its mobile social gaming platform Mobage-town: monthly subscriptions for virtual items. The aim here is make it easier for Mobage-town users to spend money on virtual items for avatars and inside games: instead of paying per item, DeNA’s new...
It was reported today that DeNA (Mobage-town) plans to launch its social gaming platform in China late February this year. COO Isao Moriyasu said in an interview that Mobage-town in China will begin with 20-30 game development partners. DeNA already has a presence in the Chinese gaming market...
There are many examples, but these came to my mind right now. 1) Twitter: Twitter has been growing at a spectacular pace in 2010 in Japan. They now have well over 10 million users, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the real number would be closer to 15 million (Twitter isn’t providing...
I just posted an article on Asiajin on GREE having announced the opening of an office in San Francisco. Read it here: GREE opens subsidiary in the US. If GREE succeeds in the US, it would be the first web company from Japan in history. I am skeptical personally, but I am even more skeptical of...
Yahoo Mobage, the PC social games platform run by Yahoo Japan and DeNA (Mobage-town), is continuing to grow nicely. Today it was reported that Yahoo Mobage now has 2 million users. The first million users were counted after 51 days, while it took Yahoo Mobage to get a second million in 53 days. 68%...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry