By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
The flood of Japanese social card battle games aimed at the global market continues: Tokyo-based Gloops, which was just acquired by Nexon, released “Warriors Of Odin” on Mobage yesterday. The title is the company’s first social game in English and is currently available on Mobage...
What an exit today in Japan’s social gaming industry: Korean gaming powerhouse Nexon (currently listed at the Tokyo Stock Exchange with a US$6 billion market cap – more than DeNA or GREE) has acquired gloops (corporate site). The size of the deal reaches a staggering Yen 36.5 billion...
Nobody can be really surprised about this, but I myself have been wondering why Japan’s big telcos keep refusing to enter the country’s big social gaming market for years, especially as all three are aggressively moving from data and voice to content sales. But today the local mobile...
I think DeNA has been clearly outpacing GREE lately when it comes to high-quality first-party games. Social RPG “Guilty Dragon”, social shooter “Macross SP Deculture”, social RPG “Valkyries In The Twilight”, and card battle game Souken No Cross Edge all look pretty good to me. And now DeNA is...
And yet another social card battle game from a Japanese maker is going global: this time, from Axel Mark. The Tokyo-based (and listed) company last month announced a cooperation with DeNA for their international business. At that time, it already said that Kingdom Wars will be the first title being...
I said it before, and I say it again: DeNA needs many, many more games to call itself a “platform” outside Japan. Just over 50 titles on Mobage in English, for example, are not enough to be able to use that term in my view – especially since Mobage Global was launched 15 months...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry