By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
Last week, DeNA and Disney inked a spectacular deal to co-develop and distribute mobile social games for the global market. The first title, Disney Party, went live on Mobage on March 30 – and it appears to be a big hit. The game reached 550,000 users in just 5 days after launch, racking up a...
BDNA, the joint venture DeNA and Namco Bandai launched last year, has a new name and logo. The new name is BNDeNA (I don’t know which name is worse), and the new logo is pictured below. The joint venture hasn’t produced any game yet, but DeNA says that Macross SP Cross Deculture, a...
Walt Disney Japan is betting high on social games, and the company has chosen Mobage operator DeNA as their partner for development and distribution of Disney-themed titles worldwide. The two companies don’t lose time – at least in Japan: after releasing the first jointly developed...
How will GREE and DeNA (with Mobage) do outside Japan? That’s a key question for the future of these two companies – and one I tried to answer during a recent presentation I gave in Tokyo. Here’s the edited version of the slides (direct link to SlideShare): DeNA And GREE: My...
au Smart Pass, a service KDDI (Japan’s second largest mobile carrier with about 30 million subscribers) launched on March 1, is on the way to become a massive success. au Smart Pass is an app subscription service for KDDI’s Android users: for a monthly fee of 390 yen/US$4.70, the...
Nice win for DeNA and maker Square Enix: Final Fantasy Brigade, the first social game using IP from the super-popular console RPG series Final Fantasy, has racked up 2 million users on Mobage. Square Enix has come up with a weird campaign to commemorate the milestone: users can get a so...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry