By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
LINE, the popular messenger app made by NHN Japan, is now available for Blackberry OS, the company announced yesterday. As almost nobody in Japan uses a Blackberry (I’d say the “man on the street” wouldn’t even know what the term Blackberry means), this version was created...
One of GREE‘s biggest Japanese brands, Monpla (short for Monster Planet), is getting a global treatment. The company has released Monpla Splash for iOS yesterday, a new social RPG (in English) that’s based on the original game GREE released in Japan in summer 2010. GREE explains: MONPLA...
Dragon Collection, a social card battle game on GREE, is nothing but a phenomenon. Not only has maker Konami paved the way for an the biggest genre in Japan’s social gaming market right now, the title also boasts a very long life cycle (for example, it’s still No. 2 in GREE’s...
GREE caused a bit of a splash in American media today when the company, for the first time, broke out sales numbers for markets outside Japan (essentially the US). The company says that in the first quarter of this year (January-March) sales in the US reached $12.15 million. In Q2, sales increased...
One of the key elements that gives Japan’s mobile social gaming platforms Mobage and GREE their “identity” is the concept of the virtual social graph. Simply put, the idea is to offer up a social environment in which the people the player interacts with are (mostly) strangers in...
It took them a while, but Mobage operator DeNA has passed GREE in terms of quarterly sales again. Both companies have just released their financial reports for the April-June quarter: while GREE hit 40 billion yen (US$510 million) in sales in that time frame, DeNA was able to pull in 47.6 billion...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry