By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
DeNA is reporting that Final Fantasy Brigade, the first social version of Square Enix’ legendary role-playing game series, now has over 1 million registered users on Mobage – in less than a month. To commemorate the milestone, Square Enix started an in-game campaign that allows players...
DeNA Studios Canada Ltd. – that’s the name of a wholly owned subsidiary DeNA has established in Vancouver last week. The Mobage company says that the local office will start operations “later this month”. From the press release: DeNA Studios Canada will be headed by...
DeNA is making another push into China: the Mobage operator announced that DeNA China and China’s biggest search engine company Baidu have partnered up to bring Mobage games to Baidu’s mobile app store. The so-called Yi Store is pre-installed on smartphones using Baidu’s Yi mobile...
I had the pleasure of taking part at Penn Olson‘s Startups In Asia conference in Singapore last week. Here is a summary of the coffee chat with me, here’s the summary of the panel discussion I moderated. Just to clarify: I was referring to the business model of social gaming in Japan as...
As expected, DeNA is striking back in the ongoing lawsuit with GREE: to recap, in November 2011 GREE sued their rival, seeking damages of US$13 million. In the lawsuit, GREE stated that DeNA has been pressuring third-party game developers in Japan into exclusively offering social games...
I have listed up several stats from several sources trying to size up Japan’s social gaming market in recent months (see below). The Nomura Research Institute says that Japan’s social gaming market will likely be worth 393.5 billion yen (US$5.1 billion) in fiscal 2016, roughly doubling...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry