By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
Zettai Bouei Leviathan, which roughly translates to “Total Defense Leviathan”, is the title of GREE‘s next big first-party game. Leviathan is a social card battle game set in a “parallel world” called Aquafol, which is threatened by evil aggressors. It was officially...
Following Nexon’s US$469 million acquisition of gloops earlier this month, Japan’s social gaming industry saw another spectacular exit today. GREE announced it plans to acquire Tokyo-based social game maker Pokelabo on October 30 – for a handsome US$173 million (13.8 billion yen)...
DeNA today announced it has teamed up with Yahoo Kimo to bring Mobage games to Taiwan (Yahoo Kimo is Yahoo’s brand name in that country). The company also says that it has made Mobage available in Traditional Chinese to reach users in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau. DeNA explains: As part of the...
Zynga went on a rampage yesterday and not only killed off over 100 jobs in the US but also “proposed” the closing of its offices in the UK and Japan (full story on TechCrunch). Here’s the part of the company’s official statement that’s related to Zynga’s office...
Big news for GREE: the company and Square Enix announced they will bring two of its biggest gaming franchises to the GREE platform, namely Final Fantasy and The World Ends With You. The bigger one first: “Final Fantasy x GREE” is the tentative title of the first Final Fantasy game to...
In a somewhat surprising move, DeNA announced “comm” today, a new voice call and chat app for iOS and Android. The app is available worldwide, for free, and in English and Japanese. To make a long story short, comm is a LINE clone. DeNA’s app offers not only the same core...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry