By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
DeNA is clearly more aggressive with regards to the Chinese market than GREE: while GREE’s entry into China is more or less limited to its partnership with Tencent, DeNA China has inked various deals with local companies in the last few months. Now the Mobage operator has added another big...
GREE and DeNA never had a close relationship (to say the very least), but things started getting really ugly – in the public eye- when GREE first sued the Mobage operator back in September 2009. The Nikkei has released this handy overview that lists up all legal disputes between the two arch...
A long battle in court has come to an end (for now): back in September 2009, GREE sued DeNA for infringing the copyright on their hit social game Tsuri Star. The title, a fishing game, was (and still is) one of GREE’s biggest money makers. GREE says DeNA has copied elements like Tsuri...
Following gloops’ Legend Cards on Facebook, Spirit Force from Drecom on iOS, it’s now DeNA/ngmoco that is bringing a successful social card battle game from Japan to English-speaking players. The title in question is Rage Of Bahamut, known in Japan as Shingeki Bahamut. Over here...
Tokyo-based gloops announced they have racked up 100,000 users on Mobage for its newest social game Magigate – in just 7 hours. The biggest third-party developer on the platform released the social card battle game on February 17. The company owes this success to a number of factors, i.e. the...
One of the main reasons DeNA, GREE and (some of) the 400+ third-party social game makers in Japan are raking in as much money as they do is “gacha”, a special element found in almost every social game in this country. I created a quick guide to explain the gacha phenomenon: I)...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry