By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
The number of 3D social games in Japan is slowly increasing, and Dark Menace from Tokyo-based Grasshopper Universe (not to be confused with Grasshopper Manufacture) is the latest such title. It just went live on Mobage for smartphones in Japan (Android, iOS). In a nutshell, Dark Menace is a...
In June, Bandai Namco caused quite a splash when the company announced a partnership with GREE under which a number of selected social games would be released on GREE’s Japanese and global platforms. (Before that, Bandai Namco inked a similar deal with Mobage in 2011, which was even refreshed in...
That was quick: just two weeks after the release in Canada, Tokyo-based social game maker KLab started offering Lord Of The Dragons in the US App Store yesterday (free download). It’s the first major release in English for KLab, which established KLab America in San Francisco in April this...
It looks like the number of active users for Facebook in Japan is now higher than that of Mixi. In March this year, Facebook caused a splash when the Tokyo office revealed its number of MAU doubled to 10 million from September 2011. Back then, I wrote: “If Facebook can keep this growth rate...
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...
GREE just announced it has secured the rights to create the first “official” sumo social game, Oozumou Card Kessen (Professional Sumo Card Battle). The company is developing the title in-house and plans to release it on GREE for feature phones and smartphones in November (pre...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry