By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
“1 Million People’s Ninja Gaiden”, the first social game based on Koei Tecmo’s popular action game franchise Ninja Gaiden, is now available on Mobage. The title was announced four weeks ago. Koei Tecmo decided to launch the title on Mobage on Android first (download, Japanese Google Play...
Just four weeks ago, GREE caused quite a splash with the announcement of a whole new line of business: merchandising based on popular characters from their first-party games. And now the company not only confirmed the final name of the subsidiary it spun off for this business (“GREE...
It’s pretty difficult (I would even say next to impossible) to be able to track what’s going on in Japan’s social and mobile gaming industry without being based here and knowing the language. The task gets even more difficult when you take into account there is hardly any source...
“Bushimo” is the name of a new social gaming platform Tokyo-based Bushiroad announced at Tokyo Game Show 2012. The new service will be exclusively available on smartphones starting sometime this winter, going (to some degree) against the likes of Mobage, GREE, or LINE. Bushiroad says...
I am not seeing many Japanese social game developers jumping ship from Mobage or GREE to LINE, but LINE operator NHN Japan did a step in the right direction at the Tokyo Game Show 2012 (which ends tomorrow). The company signed a deal with Korea-based WeMade, under which WeMade will distribute a...
I said it before, and I say it again: DeNA needs many, many more games to call itself a “platform” outside Japan. Just over 50 titles on Mobage in English, for example, are not enough to be able to use that term in my view – especially since Mobage Global was launched 15 months...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry