By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
GREE has entered a partnership with social game maker AltPlus under which the two companies have set up a joint venture in Tokyo on March 14. The background here is that all of AltPlus’ games so far are being distributed via GREE at the moment (full list here). Not too surprisingly, the new company...
Japan’s top smartphone game Puzzle & Dragons has passed the 10-million user mark. The title hit the milestone on March 9, just 19 days after reaching 9 million players. This is interesting because these numbers show that growth isn’t slowing down, as can be seen in this chart from Social...
The social gaming industry in Japan continues to mature, and the new title Tokyo-based Pokelabo announced must be seen as another step in the right direction: instead of creating yet another social RPG or card battler, the company decided to go for the action genre this time. Details are scarce at...
I always thought I have seen a lot of craziness in Japan’s mobile game industry over the last 5 years, but the Puzzle & Dragons boom in Japan is starting to scare me. Today, at the Osaka Stock Exchange, the market cap of maker GungHo rose 19.7% to hit a staggering US$4.6 billion...
In October last year, GREE took the wraps off a high-budget, next-generation social game called Zettai Bouei Leviathan (Total Defense Leviathan). Back then, I mentioned that the graphics were being created by anime studio GONZO and that the title would feature the voices of professional anime voice...
GREE didn’t have a good last financial quarter, mainly because of a lack of strong games (that talk about kompu gacha shock after-effects, for example, is total nonsense). As a consequence, even Puzzle & Dragons maker GungHo is now worth more in terms of market cap. But some recent...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry