By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
It has been a very rare occurrence for a new mobile game in Japan to break into the top 10 grossing rankings (and to stay there, at least for a while) for a very, very long time now. I would say Japan’s last real “mega blockbuster” was Fate Grand Order by Aniplex, an RPG that...
Mobile is king in Japan’s gaming market, there can be no doubt about that. In terms of market size, mobile gaming has become about 3x bigger than console gaming in Japan over the last decade. But what about Japan’s PC gaming market, long considered a niche? Japan’s PC Game Market...
Japan is home to the most publicly traded mobile gaming studios in the world: around 40-50 such companies exist in this country at the moment. The vast majority of these developers got listed after GREE (3632) and DeNA (2432) pioneered the mobile social gaming wave around 2007. Today, a new company...
It’s not a secret that a lot of the cost blocks across the value chain in mobile gaming have been getting bigger over the last years. This is also true with regards to development. After all, spec bumps in hardware are leading to increased adoption of 3D graphics, games are generally deeper...
There can be no doubt Japanese companies lead the world when it comes to understanding that free-to-play mobile games are actually services that never end. As such, live operations are viewed as a key activity in the mobile game industry’s value chain and taken very seriously over here. For...
In the last days, two domestic organizations have released updates on the size of the Japanese market for mobile games in 2015. I am aware that different data sources (especially across countries) rely on different methodologies, but I have not seen any numbers that are bigger than these elsewhere...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry