By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
You could call it a clever marketing idea, total nonsense or a sign of how mature the Japanese social gaming industry is, but the day has come: Japan has a credit card that’s connected to a mobile gaming platform, as DeNA (2432) has released a Mobage credit card today. To be more precise, the...
Tokyo-based Colopl (3668) may be a nobody outside Japan, but over here, the company has evolved into a US$2.4 billion mobile gaming powerhouse after going IPO in December 2012. US$2.4 billion in market cap is a not only a very handsome number for an almost entirely domestic company: it also means...
Mobage operator DeNA (2432) took the wraps off a new first-party game yesterday, a social 3D RPG called “Magic & Cannon”. The game will become available in the form of a smartphone app for the Japanese Mobage platform on iOS and Android “soon” (users can pre-register...
If this becomes reality, this is surely one of the biggest developments in Japan’s mobile gaming scene in recent months. The country’s biggest business daily The Nikkei just reported on its website that a total of 15 Japanese mobile game makers are preparing to join forces in marketing...
As a legacy of the feature phone era (which is not yet over), Japan is the only country in the world in which millions of people play games inside their smartphone browser – mostly on the GREE (3632) and DeNA (2432)-operated Mobage platforms. Devs over here are slowly but surely shifting to...
Last year in September, during the Tokyo Game Show 2012, GREE (3632) took the wraps off “Project Fantasm:A”, a new first-party title with some pretty high-profile names behind it. GREE didn’t talk much about their “AAA” social game since but fast forward to today, and it’s...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry