By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
GREE, which hasn’t seen a few hits on its platform in quite some time now, can be happy: Metal Gear Solid Social Ops, the first social game in the Metal Gear franchise, seems to be a success. The GREE-exclusive title launched on December 4, was off to a good start, and passed 500,000...
Namco Bandai‘s social gaming business is doing very, very well: the company today announced it counts a total 30 million users across their social games offered on the Japanese market. There are various reasons for this success: Namco Bandai has partnerships with Mobage and GREE, usually uses...
Tokyo-based social game maker enish got listed at the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s Mothers section for startups today (ticker: 3667), as announced last month. The stock price went up from 800 Yen to 1,360 Yen, helping the company to reach a 3.3 billion yen (US$40 million) market cap. In other...
As far as headcount is concerned, GREE has been growing rapidly in recent months in the US (you can use the “hires” tag provided by tech blog Inside Mobile Apps to keep track of the company’s development on that front). But it seems like the hiring spree has just been put on hold...
Major Tokyo-based social game maker gumi has today officially announced its first social game in English: Knight Legends is a port of a Japanese title gumi released last year on GREE (“Kishido” was pretty successful and went on to win a platform award from GREE earlier this year). The...
This is a critical title for GREE: Konami just released Metal Gear Solid Social Ops, the first social game in the Metal Gear franchise, on the platform. Both GREE and Konami announced the Unity 3D game during a special event in Japan at the end of August. I then had the chance to play an early...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry