By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
As I expected, DeNA is introducing payment caps for virtual items in social games offered on Mobage for minors. The company is following competitor GREE, which has announced a very similar move last month. The background here is the mounting criticism in Japanese media (not by Japanese consumers...
GREE‘s US subsidiary GREE International is trying to strengthen its position in North America: the San-Francisco based company has announced it bought a stake in IUGO, a mobile game maker from Vancouver. Terms and details of the deal weren’t disclosed, but GREE says it was a...
Tokyo-based social game maker gumi has started implementing its plan to go global: the company silently opened an office in South Korea on April 10. gumi is one of the biggest 3rd-party social game providers in Japan (and a GREE investee). In the English press release, gumi explains the first...
It’s no secret that Konami is clearly the most successful of all video game makers in the Japanese social gaming market. Their flagship title, Dragon Collection, for example, just hit 6 million users on GREE. And now Konami announced that it now counts a whopping 20 million registered players...
Tokyo-based (and listed) KLab has announced it acquired Pikkle, a social gaming company established in 2005. Pikkle was led by Englishman David “DC” Collier who joins KLab to accelerate its international business. In 2009, Pikkle raised money from Mixi, CyberAgent, and a few other...
How big is the social gaming industry players like GREE, DeNA with Mobage, or Mixi are operating in? Tokyo-based designer Francesco Romano has used data I put together to create a flashy infographic that tries to answer this question, based on numbers coming from various sources. The infographic...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry