By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
Tokyo-based smartphone game maker Pokelabo (acquired by GREE last year) has launched SWORD OF PHANTASIA in Japan yesterday, a social RPG for iOS (F2P download). Like a lot of Pokelabo’s recent games, Sword Of Phantasia isn’t a “simple” game but tries to appeal to...
I was recently asked by Eric Seufert, marketing and mobile user acquisition specialist at Grey Area in Helsinki, to give an interview on Japan’s mobile and social gaming scene. Eric has an excellent blog, on which he analyzes various aspects of the mobile industry, most recently the gaming...
There can be no discussion that in Japan, LINE is the king of chat apps at the moment. Maker NHN Japan, which now operates the service under a new company called LINE Corp., should be announcing 50 million domestic users very soon. If there is one competitor, it’s certainly Korean chat app...
Here is a presentation I gave a few days ago in Tokyo on Japan’s social and mobile gaming industry. It’s dubbed “Social Games In Japan 2013: Status Quo, Trends And Internationalization”, and it covers exactly what the title suggests. (I need to add that nobody in the...
Japan’s top smartphone game Puzzle & Dragons, which is estimated to generate a mind-blowing US$62-86 million per month (some think it’s even more), continues to grow. The RPG/puzzle hybrid now has 11 million users in Japan, maker GungHo is reporting. This chart from Japanese news...
I put together the following article for Social Casino Intelligence, the biggest publication covering the global social casino industry. The link to the online version of the original piece is here. The US$5 billion social gaming market in Japan is unique in many ways, but one of the most striking...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry