By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
At this year’s Tokyo Game Show, mobile game maker GungHo (3765) finally revealed a few more details about its follow-up to Puzzle & Dragons, Japan’s most popular smartphone title. And it’s not Puzzle & Dragons 2 but a completely new title called “Divine Gate”...
Tokyo-based Colopl (3668) may be a nobody outside Japan, but over here, the company has evolved into a US$2.4 billion mobile gaming powerhouse after going IPO in December 2012. US$2.4 billion in market cap is a not only a very handsome number for an almost entirely domestic company: it also means...
Supercell, King, Game Insight, Social Quantum, Goodgame, Tencent, WeMade, Kabam, Pocket Gems: the list of foreign mobile game companies with an interest in Japan is getting longer and longer. Among the ones that are already here, EA Japan has caused the biggest splash in recent months in the...
Mobage operator DeNA (2432) took the wraps off a new first-party game yesterday, a social 3D RPG called “Magic & Cannon”. The game will become available in the form of a smartphone app for the Japanese Mobage platform on iOS and Android “soon” (users can pre-register...
If you can’t beat them, join them: that’s what GREE (3632) probably thought when it allowed its subsidiary in Seoul, GREE Korea, to use a competing platform for distribution of in-house content – a few months after the company’s own platform plans outside Japan were buried...
Earlier this month, Kabam made some heads turn in Japan when the American company announced an international marketing deal with Tokyo-based mobile game maker KLab. That agreement was entered a few months after Kabam set up a US$50 million fund to help Japanese mobile game companies expand globally...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry