By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
Mixi (2121), Japan’s once largest social network , is back from the dead. In September 2006, Mixi was the first s0-called Web 2.0 startup ever to go IPO and managed to maintain its status as a large-cap company for years until it stopped innovating and was hit by a flood of competitors:...
A lot has been written and said about the status quo and future of Nintendo (7974) , after the company reported disastrous financial results about two weeks ago: introducing its own tablet, putting a successor to the Wii U on the fast track, buying a smartphone game maker, splitting into multiple...
BDNA, the joint venture that Mobage operator DeNA (2432) and Namco Bandai (7832) launched in 2011 and that was rebranded to BNDeNA in 2012, is ending on March 31 this year. The news isn’t coming as a big surprise, for a few reasons. First, BNDeNA has released pretty solid games such as Gundam...
Tokyo-based Colopl (3668), which I recently called “the biggest mobile game maker you never heard of”, is on a roll. Colopl’s market cap currently stands at US$3.4 billion, higher than that of Zynga (ZNGA, US$3.2 billion), DeNA (2432, US$3.1 billion), or GREE (3632, US$2.3 billion). Outside...
Advertising mobile games on television doesn’t sound intuitive at this point in time, given the immaturity of the mobile gaming industry, the now less important position of TV as a marketing channel, high production costs for ads, inability to track effectiveness, problems in attributing user...
Colopl (3668), the Tokyo-based company which I recently called “the biggest mobile game maker you never heard of”, is running from one milestone to the other. Last week, Colopl announced it has amassed a whopping 60 million registered users across its portfolio of games on iOS and...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry