By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
Today, Japan’s biggest video game magazine Famitsu published (JP) new stats showing that the country’s market for console gaming continues to shrink. According to Famitsu, the combined sales in Japan for video game hard- and software amounted to US$2.59 billion between December 28, 2015...
Is Zynga following through on its announcement to “consider” closing the Tokyo office, after about 2 years of operation in Japan? It looks like it. Zynga Japan will shut down a total of three games on December 21 this year, namely its Pokemon-type social RPG Montopia, Mojitomo (Words...
I can’t say this is a big surprise: Zynga announced it will release the two original games that its Japanese subsidiary developed so far, Montopia and Ayakashi: Ghost Guild, in the West. Both titles belong to the social card battle game genre and have been released in Japan earlier this year...
Earthquake in Japan’s social gaming industry today: a council of six major Japanese companies in this space today announced they will abolish the controversial “kompu gacha” (complete gacha) function from all of their titles by the end of May. No new games offering the mechanic...
Zynga Japan has been very quiet for a while (the reason being they just weren’t very active or successful in recent months, to say the least), but now the company has rolled out a social RPG with original IP for iOS (Zynga Japan calls it a “Monster Battle RPG”). What’s...
GREE released one of its hit titles playable on Japanese feature phones, Monster Planet, as a smartphone version (Android, iPhone) earlier this week. I tried it out on the iPhone, and the port is really good. The Pokemon-like monster raising game is playable directly in the smartphone browser and...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry