By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
The “kompu gacha” (complete gacha) shock has come to a temporary “official” close today: Japan’s National Consumer Affairs Agency declared [PDF] that the mechanic found in many social games on GREE and DeNA‘s Mobage platform is illegal. I am not a legal expert...
I am a hardcore user of Q&A service Quora where I just gave a detailed answer to this question: Will collectible cards game genre in mobile social games pick up in South East Asia? My answer: In Japan, by far the world’s biggest market for mobile social games, social card games (social...
Nikkei Business Online is reporting that Kenji Kasahara is ready to sell his 55% stake in Mixi (it’s not unusual for Japanese CEOs to hold such a large percentage of their companies, even after multiple rounds of funding and an IPO). To make it clear: this is just a rumor at this point, and...
Apart from gacha (and complete gacha in particular), real-money trading is another area for which Japan’s social gaming industry has been under fire in recent months. What is real-money trading? Real-money trading (RMT) describes a phenomenon under which virtual items are being sold for real...
GREE caused quite a splash in Japan back in March when the company announced it made acclaimed video game maker Level-5 change from Mobage to their own platform, at least as far as social game development is concerned. (Level-5 started offering its first social game ever, Professor Layton Royale...
Tanken Doliland, GREE‘s impossibly successful 1st-party social game, will be turned into an anime series on Japanese TV. Details are scarce at this point, but the show will have the same name as the social card battle game/RPG and be based on the Doliland world. Toei, the company behind the...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry