By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
DeNA just announced that it will rebrand its mobile social gaming platform Mobage-town to just “Mobage” from March 28. Mobage will also be the brand name for international markets. ngmoco’s plus+ community will be absorbed into Mobage from that day as well. At the same time, DeNA...
Did you know that GREE and DeNA spend millions of US dollars to promote their social games on Japanese TV? In the July-September 2010 quarter, for example, both companies have invested around US$35 million each in TV advertising. GREE and DeNA were practically absent from the television advertising...
I attended Startupdating #5 yesterday, an event in Tokyo that connects Japan’s web entrepreneurs with engineers looking for new opportunities. Speakers at the event were Hironao Kunimitsu (CEO of Gumi) and Taisei Tanaka (CEO of Geisha Tokyo Entertainment). Their companies are among the...
Japan’s biggest social games company DeNA is to generate $1.3 billion in revenue this fiscal year: Japan’s leading social games company, DeNA (listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange with a $5.4 billion market cap), is running from one record to the other. The company, whose mobile social gaming...
First off, it’s important to understand that currently, social gaming in Japan largely means mobile social gaming. Second, it’s a multi-billion dollar market with mind-boggling profit rates for the biggest players involved. As such, many social gaming startups were created lately. You...
DeNA today announced it will make it possible for the 2 million users of Yahoo Mobage, its PC-based social games platform run with Yahoo Japan, to pay via online banking. The obvious goal is to remove friction for players paying real money for virtual in-game or avatar-related items (and to boost...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry