By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
How have ARPU and sales of DeNA and GREE changed over the last months? Japanese blog “Shares” has created two handy charts that show how these metrics developed from 2008, and I translated them below. This chart shows the ARPU for DeNA (Mobage) and GREE between 2008 and today. If this...
Capcom isn’t the only Japanese video game maker seeing growth in its social games segment: Konami has posted the results for the first half of their current fiscal year (2012), and this is how things look for Konami as a whole: Sales for social games (SNS games) jumped from 65 to US$216...
Video game maker Capcom has posted the financial results for the second half of this fiscal year (March to September), and the company focuses heavily on its social gaming segment. Things don’t look too well for Capcom as a whole, as can be seen here: But the company also said that: downloads...
GREE has announced it will buy MARS, a Tokyo-based smartphone development company, this month. MARS spin-off venture FEYNMAN, which offers a billing solution for smartphone apps, will be part of the deal, too. GREE says it hopes to ” to strengthen its development capability for smartphone...
Among the big Japanese web companies, Cyberagent is the most aggressive one when it comes to investing in startups in Japan and abroad (via CyberAgent Ventures). Now GREE also says it will set up a wholly-owned subsidiary, GREE Ventures, that will invest in web (not only gaming) startups worldwide...
GREE has been strangely quiet on their expansion plans in the US after the company bought Openfeint back in April for US$104 million. To date, not one GREE 1st-party game has been localized for non-Japanese markets, for example (to be fair, there are only about ten, and some of them aren’t...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry