By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
Following Mobage operator DeNA last week, GREE released its financial report for the April-June quarter (Q4 of fiscal 2012) today. The company has seen net sales grow to 40 billion yen (US$510 million), which is up 90% year-on-year. Profit shot up, too, but both sales and profit took a nose dive on...
Dark Summoner, a mobile social card battle game made by Nagoya-based Ateam, continues to do well. The title was released worldwide on iOS on February 23 this year, on Android on July 18, and hit 1 million downloads on July 27 – after around 170 days. And today Ateam announced that Dark...
Sekigahara Engi, a social card battle game developed by Tokyo-based D2C, hit the 1 million user mark on July 2 (the news was made public on Monday). The interesting bullet point here is that the app is only available in Japanese, only on smartphones (download for iOS and Android here), and...
Way back in September 2009, GREE sued DeNA for infringing the copyright on their hit social game Tsuri Star (Fishing Star outside Japan). GREE claimed that its biggest rival (or to be more precise: the developer of the game, Tokyo-based mobile tech company Orso) copied certain designs and game...
Konami released their financial report for Q1 of fiscal 2013 (April to June 2012), and things aren’t looking too good for the company. Here’s the basic financial overview: Just like in Q1 of last fiscal, Konami’s social game segment made more money than its consumer games segment:...
On the road to (possibly) becoming a global mobile social gaming platform, Mobage operator DeNA has always been taking the Chinese market much more seriously than GREE. To recap, DeNA has so far signed deals with the following companies in China (in chronological order): AliBaba Kaixin001 Netdragon...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry