By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
LINE, a social/messenger app for smartphones and other devices, made by NHN Japan (the Tokyo-based office of the Korean web company), keeps growing and growing. Just a few weeks after hitting 30 million registered users (on April 18), the app reached the 40 million mark on June 6. Growth seems to...
GREE International just launched a “promotion site” (I don’t know what else to call it) to promote their service to an English-speaking audience. Not only is the design weird (the homepage looks like the cover of a printed brochure), the content is, too: the company basically just...
Korean tech blog beSUCCESS is organizing the beLAUNCH 2012 conference, the first global startup event ever to be hosted in that country (from June 13-14). The event is a little light on games, unfortunately, but offers an interesting program with of speakers coming to Seoul from all over the world...
Five weeks after the Funzio deal in the US, GREE acquired another foreign social game maker. This time, the company went for Korean startup PaprikaLab, which has released a number of titles on Facebook and mobile devices so far. GREE teamed up with Seoul-based COM2US for a social baseball game last...
I’m a big fan of PopCap’s tile-matching puzzle game series (and money-printing machine) Bejeweled and was excited to hear today that GREE added a new version of the game to their platform. Bejeweled Legend is an entirely new addition to the franchise, exclusively available for players...
While GREE appears to have given up on China, DeNA still keeps investing in that market: the Mobage operator just announced a deal with Chinese social networking service Renren. DeNA explains: As a part of the alliance, DeNA China and Renren have opened a dedicated section for Mobage inside the...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry