By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
14-year old CyberAgent is close to a radical transformation of one its main pillars of business, the Ameba platform. Over the years, Ameba has transformed itself from a pure blogging platform on PCs and feature phones to a cross-service platform (using a single log-in approach) and successfully...
Nice win for DeNA: Rage Of Bahamut, a social card battle game made by Tokyo-based Cygames (a CyberAgent subsidiary), is the top-grossing app on Google Play. The main bullet point here is that the Android app is part of the Mobage network since February this year. Industry blog Inside Mobile Apps...
With regulation possibly around the corner, that council six top Japanese social game makers and platforms formed last month has announced a first set of measures to react to the mounting criticism of the industry in Japanese media. The council consists of members...
As I expected, DeNA is introducing payment caps for virtual items in social games offered on Mobage for minors. The company is following competitor GREE, which has announced a very similar move last month. The background here is the mounting criticism in Japanese media (not by Japanese consumers...
How big is the social gaming industry players like GREE, DeNA with Mobage, or Mixi are operating in? Tokyo-based designer Francesco Romano has used data I put together to create a flashy infographic that tries to answer this question, based on numbers coming from various sources. The infographic...
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...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry