By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
A lot has been written and said about how hit-driven the mobile game business has become over the last few years, but if the industry needed another bit of evidence, here it is: the market cap of Mixi (2121), Japan’s once biggest social network, has eclipsed that of Mobage operator DeNA...
Mixi (2121), Japan’s once largest social network , is back from the dead. In September 2006, Mixi was the first s0-called Web 2.0 startup ever to go IPO and managed to maintain its status as a large-cap company for years until it stopped innovating and was hit by a flood of competitors:...
Every once in a while, I am seeing alarmist tweets or reports that indicate the number of Facebook users in a certain territory has “dramatically dropped” in a very short period of time. In the case of Japan, the last time this made the rounds in social media and elsewhere was in June...
Japan’ social networking space has surely changed a lot in the last 2 years. There can be no doubt that chat app LINE (released in the summer of 2011) is the undisputed king in this area in Japan, boasting over 40 million domestic users. At the same time, Japan’s once biggest real...
Mixi has released its financial report for the second quarter of fiscal 2012, and it looks like the company’s actual situation is better than its current image in Japan. Sales and profit have gone up year-on-year as follows, but most of the key financial numbers went sideways or south quarter...
It looks like the number of active users for Facebook in Japan is now higher than that of Mixi. In March this year, Facebook caused a splash when the Tokyo office revealed its number of MAU doubled to 10 million from September 2011. Back then, I wrote: “If Facebook can keep this growth rate...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry