By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
GREE today announced plans to establish GREE Canada, a wholly owned subsidiary, in Vancouver. The company cites two reasons for the location: the vicinity to a number of other game makers (and personnel) and the fact that both Vancouver and Silicon Valley are in the same time zone. GREE...
Tokyo-based Cygames, a 100% subsidiary of Japanese web powerhouse Cyberagent, is on a roll. The company behind social game mega-hit Rage Of Bahamut announced it has registered its 10 millionth user on July 14. Cygames, which is barely a year old (established in May 2011), currently employs 262...
Rage Of Bahamut continues to do well outside Japan: the social card battle game, developed by Tokyo-based Cyberagent company Cygames, hit 2 million downloads outside this country on July 10. The title was released on Mobage for Android by DeNA/ngmoco in late February this year. Rage Of Bahamut hit...
Puzzle & Dragons, developed by Tokyo-based GungHo, continues to do well. The title is the first mega-hit in the Japanese social game market (on smartphones) that’s not using the Mobage, GREE, or Mixi networks. Puzzle & Dragons was released in the Japanese App Store on February 20 this...
DeNA today announced it inked a deal with Hasbro under which the Mobage operator has a three-year exclusive right to create and publish games based on the Transformers franchise. The first Transformers game will hit Mobage on iOS and Android worldwide “later this year” – with the...
How much money can be made in mobile social card battle games? Assuming that no makers are gaming the system, it seems like quite a lot. In Japan, well over 70% of the top 20 games on Mobage and GREE belong to this genre (or at least have a card-collecting element in them). There is no end in...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry