By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
This is big: Japanese telecommunications giant SoftBank (the one that acquired Sprint in the US) will launch a tender offer to increase its stake in GungHo Online Entertainment between April 1 and 26 this year (GungHo will conduct a 10-for-1 share split on April 1). GungHo has produced Puzzle &...
NHN Japan today said that games offered on the in-app game platform on LINE have been downloaded a total of 100 million times so far. The company opened the app to game developers in July last year. Most of the titles on “LINE Game” have been doing extremely well – social shooter Dragon...
Japan’s top smartphone game Puzzle & Dragons has passed the 10-million user mark. The title hit the milestone on March 9, just 19 days after reaching 9 million players. This is interesting because these numbers show that growth isn’t slowing down, as can be seen in this chart from Social...
So far, LINE Game, the in-app gaming platform LINE operator NHN Japan launched last summer has been doing extremely well – most recently with Dragon Flight and Theater Town. And now it seems that NHN Japan is ready to step on the gas: the mega-popular original app has been advertised on...
I always thought I have seen a lot of craziness in Japan’s mobile game industry over the last 5 years, but the Puzzle & Dragons boom in Japan is starting to scare me. Today, at the Osaka Stock Exchange, the market cap of maker GungHo rose 19.7% to hit a staggering US$4.6 billion...
GREE didn’t have a good last financial quarter, mainly because of a lack of strong games (that talk about kompu gacha shock after-effects, for example, is total nonsense). As a consequence, even Puzzle & Dragons maker GungHo is now worth more in terms of market cap. But some recent...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry