By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
Tokyo-based (and listed) social game maker Voltage is famous in Japan for covering a very specific genre: social dating simulations. In these games, players are supposed to “date” virtual characters in various settings, usually embedded in a narrative that guides users from one...
Japanese social gaming industry blog “Social Game Info” posted an interesting chart today. The overview sheds a light on the financial performance of Japan’s six listed third-party social game developers on a quarter-on-quarter basis. The companies are: Voltage (focuses on social...
The “kompu gacha” (complete gacha) shock has come to a temporary “official” close today: Japan’s National Consumer Affairs Agency declared [PDF] that the mechanic found in many social games on GREE and DeNA‘s Mobage platform is illegal. I am not a legal expert...
I am a hardcore user of Q&A service Quora where I just gave a detailed answer to this question: Will collectible cards game genre in mobile social games pick up in South East Asia? My answer: In Japan, by far the world’s biggest market for mobile social games, social card games (social...
Nikkei Business Online is reporting that Kenji Kasahara is ready to sell his 55% stake in Mixi (it’s not unusual for Japanese CEOs to hold such a large percentage of their companies, even after multiple rounds of funding and an IPO). To make it clear: this is just a rumor at this point, and...
Apart from gacha (and complete gacha in particular), real-money trading is another area for which Japan’s social gaming industry has been under fire in recent months. What is real-money trading? Real-money trading (RMT) describes a phenomenon under which virtual items are being sold for real...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry