By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
GREE caused quite a splash in Japan back in March when the company announced it made acclaimed video game maker Level-5 change from Mobage to their own platform, at least as far as social game development is concerned. (Level-5 started offering its first social game ever, Professor Layton Royale...
Tanken Doliland, GREE‘s impossibly successful 1st-party social game, will be turned into an anime series on Japanese TV. Details are scarce at this point, but the show will have the same name as the social card battle game/RPG and be based on the Doliland world. Toei, the company behind the...
MapleStory, the super hit MMORPG from Korea, was the basis for a social game released on the Mobage platform back in October 2011, MapleStory: Bokura No Boken (“Our Adventures”). And now GREE is getting a MapleStory-based title too. Dubbed “MapleStory – Brave Monsters”, the new...
In case you were wondering when exactly GREE would open its globally integrated social gaming platform, GREE CEO Yoshikazu Tanaka just gave an answer – on Facebook. The platform was first announced back in December, with plans to launch it sometime between April and June this year. A few...
Tokyo-based Klab played a major role in the “kompu gacha” shock story that rocked the Japanese social game industry in the last week. The company is one of Japan’s biggest 3rd-party social game makers and developed titles on Mobage, Yahoo-Mobage, Mixi, GREE, and Nico Nico Douga...
One question a lot of people are asking me frequently is how and why the social gaming industry in Japan has exploded over the last few years. There are a quite a few reasons for the expansion of the business, and one of them is the usage of good old TV commercials. In sharp contrast to the US and...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry