By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
GREE is again preparing to take legal action against DeNA, following a lawsuit from September 2009 (when GREE accused its competitor of copying one of their hit games). This time, GREE says DeNA is blocking access to games made by third-party developers. The accusation isn’t really new: in...
Walt Disney Japan has seen some decent success after launching their first social game, Disney My Land, on Mobage in April this year (the title has constantly been on Mobage‘s top 20 games since). In case you didn’t know, Disney has huge brand power in Japan. While the theme park...
“Dainekkyo!! Pro Yakyu Card”, a social baseball card game made by Tokyo-based social game maker GMS (recently named gloops), now has 1.5 million registered users on Mobage. The English title of the game is “Japan Pro Baseball Card Battle”. It’s available on both Mobage for feature...
Bandai Namco announced [PDF] that one of their titles on GREE, Gundam-based Sci-Fi social game Gundam Masters, has hit 1 million registered users on October 3. What’s interesting is that the game was released just on September 1, meaning it added an impressive 1,262 players per hour since...
With tens of thousands of games to choose from, “discoverability” is a big problem for gaming companies offering on Facebook, in the App Store or on the Android Market. But how about Japan, on DeNA‘s Mobage or GREE? Mobage and GREE offer “only” over 1,000 games each...
Tokyo-based tech company Ubiquitous Entertainment (UEI) has secured 500 million Yen (US$6.5 million) through allocating new shares to JAFCO, one of Japan’s biggest venture capital companies. UEI is known to produce a whole range of products, i.e. smartphone apps, tablet apps, middleware, etc...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry