By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
Tokyo-based smartphone game maker Pokelabo (acquired by GREE last year) has launched SWORD OF PHANTASIA in Japan yesterday, a social RPG for iOS (F2P download). Like a lot of Pokelabo’s recent games, Sword Of Phantasia isn’t a “simple” game but tries to appeal to...
I was recently asked by Eric Seufert, marketing and mobile user acquisition specialist at Grey Area in Helsinki, to give an interview on Japan’s mobile and social gaming scene. Eric has an excellent blog, on which he analyzes various aspects of the mobile industry, most recently the gaming...
Here is a presentation I gave a few days ago in Tokyo on Japan’s social and mobile gaming industry. It’s dubbed “Social Games In Japan 2013: Status Quo, Trends And Internationalization”, and it covers exactly what the title suggests. (I need to add that nobody in the...
I put together the following article for Social Casino Intelligence, the biggest publication covering the global social casino industry. The link to the online version of the original piece is here. The US$5 billion social gaming market in Japan is unique in many ways, but one of the most striking...
GREE continues to step on the gas: after securing a number of promising games, announcing a partnership with Yahoo, and expanding its merchandising business, the company today said it entered a joint venture with Ameba operator CyberAgent. This is remarkable, as a) CyberAgent is a top provider of...
Growth in Japan’s social gaming market is starting to slow down, competition is increasing, and internationalization isn’t going as well as expected. So what can you do as a mobile game platform provider? While Mobage operator DeNA continues to do m-commerce and started branching out...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry