By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
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...
Good news coming from the world’s biggest mobile market are sparse so far (to say the least), but DeNA isn’t letting go of China. Far from it. Japan’s largest mobile carrier NTT Docomo (about 60 million subscribers) announced it has established a joint venture with China’s...
Tokyo-based social game maker (and Sega partner) Pokelabo has released “Mystic Monsters” on Tuesday, a social card battle game for iOS and Android. Set on the island of Atlantis, Mystic Monsters is being pitched as a “dark fantasy RPG” that allows players to form guilds to...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry