By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
In September 2010, it wasn’t a social gaming company but Konami that triggered the biggest boom in the history of this new industry (in Japan): social card battle games. The title in question is Dragon Collection, which has over 7 million players in Japan and is still doing well on GREE...
DeNA has partnered up with Nexon to distribute the Korean company’s mobile social games on the Mobage platform, both in Japan and abroad. DeNA’s official statement suggests that this “global business alliance” will be pretty extensive: Nexon and its subsidiaries NEXON Korea...
It took NHN Japan a bit longer than they wanted, but today it happened: super-popular messenger app LINE has passed the 100 million user mark (the original plan was to get there by the end of last year). The company was very clever in initiating a countdown marketing/PR campaign earlier this week...
AKB48 Stage Fighter, the first social game featuring Japanese girl group sensation AKB48 was released on GREE in October 2011 and went on to, partly fueled by TV advertising, become a big hit (it’s still popular today). And today Bandai Namco released the second AKB48-themed social game on...
Tokyo-based research firm Yano has released a chart that visualizes the size of the Japanese social gaming market between 2009 and 2013. According to Yano, the industry will grow to US$4.8 billion this year, a relatively modest plus from the US$4.3 billion the firm has calculated for 2012 (the...
In October last year, GREE caused quite a splash in the mobile and console gaming worlds with their announcement that they partnered up with Square Enix. The deal included a social reboot of popular (and awesome) 3DS game “The World Ends With You” and “Final Fantasy...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry