By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
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...
Japan’s most successful platform-free social game Puzzle & Dragons continues to amaze. Maker GungHo announced that their flagship title has reached 2 million downloads – in Japan only, on iOS and Android only (there is no feature phone version), and...
Messenger app sensation KakaoTalk is the clear winner in its home market of Korea (65 million users worldwide) but hasn’t been able to win over users in Japan where LINE is the undisputed king. KakaoTalk has been available in Japanese for quite a while now, but now maker Kakao Corp. is ready...
Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu has released their ranking of the top 50 high-growth companies in Japan in the TMT sector (Technology, Media & Telecommunications), and the rapid expansion of the country’s social gaming sector is clearly reflected in the list. According to Deloitte’s...
What are the current key trends in the gaming market in Japan and elsewhere? That’s the question I tried to answer in a presentation I gave a few weeks ago. (Note: no one in the audience belonged to the gaming industry.) The slides cover: Structure Of Japan’s Social Gaming Market Market Size 10 Key...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry