By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
GREE continues to step on the gas: after securing a number of promising games, announcing a partnership with Yahoo, and expanding its merchandising business, the company today said it entered a joint venture with Ameba operator CyberAgent. This is remarkable, as a) CyberAgent is a top provider of...
Growth in Japan’s social gaming market is starting to slow down, competition is increasing, and internationalization isn’t going as well as expected. So what can you do as a mobile game platform provider? While Mobage operator DeNA continues to do m-commerce and started branching out...
Japan’s top smartphone game Puzzle & Dragons has passed the 10-million user mark. The title hit the milestone on March 9, just 19 days after reaching 9 million players. This is interesting because these numbers show that growth isn’t slowing down, as can be seen in this chart from Social...
I always thought I have seen a lot of craziness in Japan’s mobile game industry over the last 5 years, but the Puzzle & Dragons boom in Japan is starting to scare me. Today, at the Osaka Stock Exchange, the market cap of maker GungHo rose 19.7% to hit a staggering US$4.6 billion...
Sony sure seems to be in need of a lot of cash at the moment. In the last few days and weeks, the company sold off: the Sony Building in New York for US$1.1 billion the Sony City Osaki Building in Tokyo for US$1.2 billion and a portion of its stake in online medical service subsidiary M3 Inc. for...
Japan’s top smartphone game Puzzle & Dragons continues to amaze. I don’t want to hype the RPG/Puzzle hybrid even more here, but I do think it’s definitely noteworthy that maker GungHo’s market cap is going through the roof. To recap, I wrote four weeks ago that the...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry