By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
Following Nexon’s US$469 million acquisition of gloops earlier this month, Japan’s social gaming industry saw another spectacular exit today. GREE announced it plans to acquire Tokyo-based social game maker Pokelabo on October 30 – for a handsome US$173 million (13.8 billion yen)...
Big news for GREE: the company and Square Enix announced they will bring two of its biggest gaming franchises to the GREE platform, namely Final Fantasy and The World Ends With You. The bigger one first: “Final Fantasy x GREE” is the tentative title of the first Final Fantasy game to...
Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu has released their ranking of the top 50 high-growth companies in Japan in the TMT sector (Technology, Media & Telecommunications), and the rapid expansion of the country’s social gaming sector is clearly reflected in the list. According to Deloitte’s...
What are the current key trends in the gaming market in Japan and elsewhere? That’s the question I tried to answer in a presentation I gave a few weeks ago. (Note: no one in the audience belonged to the gaming industry.) The slides cover: Structure Of Japan’s Social Gaming Market Market Size 10 Key...
Tokyo-based GungHo, maker of Japan’s most successful platform-free social game Puzzle & Dragons, is ready to invest more in marketing their flagship title. Puzzle & Dragons isn’t using the Mobage or GREE networks but has racked up 1.5 million users so far – in Japan only...
The Nikkei caused a big splash two weeks ago when the business daily broke the news that Japan’s biggest mobile carrier NTT Docomo (around 60 million subscribers) is planning to enter the social gaming business. The information available back then was relatively thin, but Docomo...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry