By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
HTML5 is one of the biggest buzzwords in social gaming today, and there are many companies betting high on the technology to become a standard for making games in the near future. Now GREE has announced it has invested in a company that focuses on HTML5, Tokyo-based startup Wizcorp. That’s...
Note: the last picture on the bottom might be slightly NSFW. Companies that make billions of US dollars with social games, a social game academy, at least five printed social gaming magazines, social dating and horse racing sims with millions of users: no doubt, Japan is a very unique market for...
GREE is introducing yet another measure against real-money trading of virtual items from its platform – following a task force, a set of automated tools, payment caps and a council with members from Japan’s top social gaming companies (see here, here, and here). The main driver here is...
Anyone just vaguely familiar with social gaming in Japan knows that (almost) all users use mobile devices to play these games: GREE and Mobage are cell phone-only services. Most users live in the Tokyo area, and a lot of people play social games to kill time during their train commute to and from...
Edit (May 5, 2012): It happened, the Japanese government is reported to be ready to crack down on social games. See here. Japan’s social gaming industry in general, and its current 800-pound gorilla GREE in particular, are getting a lot of bad press at the moment. Social games were never...
Japan has another social game maker that went IPO at the Tokyo Stock Exchange: Ateam, a Nagoya-based company, got listed in the Mothers section (code: 3662) yesterday. As many domestic social gaming companies (i.e. Klab), Ateam didn’t start with a focus on these games: the company was founded...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry