By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
“GxYz”, the joint venture GREE (3632) and Yahoo Japan established back in February this year, has released its first game. “Driland – Devil King Army vs. Men Of Valor” (a rough translation of the title) is a spin off of social card battler Driland (aka Doliland), GREE’s...
Japan’s most popular smartphone game Puzzle & Dragons has been gaining one million registered users domestically every three weeks or so 15 times in a row to currently boast 17 million. Last month, maker GungHo (3765) said the title has over one million players in South Korea. But so far, the...
GungHo Online Entertainment (3765), the company behind Japan’s top smartphone game Puzzle & Dragons, today published its financial report for January to June 2013. Here are the main data points in English for that time frame (the report is available in Japanese only): sales: US$763 million...
Japan’s top smartphone game Puzzle & Dragons has arrived at 17 million users on July 22, maker GungHo (3765) has announced. The number only includes Japanese users, across the App Store, Google Play, and the Kindle. Just like earlier this month, when the game hit 16 million players, the number...
As a legacy of the feature phone era (which is not yet over), Japan is the only country in the world in which millions of people play games inside their smartphone browser – mostly on the GREE (3632) and DeNA (2432)-operated Mobage platforms. Devs over here are slowly but surely shifting to...
US-based Pocket Gems has entered a partnership with GMO Gamecenter, Inc., a subsidiary of Japanese Internet powerhouse GMO Group (9449). The “America connection” here is that GMO Gamecenter in the US has been running the English-language Android game platform G-Gee since 2011 (there is...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry