By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
Big shake-up in Japan’s gaming industry today: LINE Corp., the company behind Japan’s biggest messenger app LINE, has reached a basic agreement to form a business and capital partnership with top mobile game maker gumi, TechCrunch Japan is reporting. gumi subsidiary Alim has produced...
According to a report just published in the Nikkei Keizai Shimbun Online, LINE Corp. is planning to combine user data with a cloud CRM solution from Salesforce.com to deliver targeted ads to the users of its messenger app. The new ad service is exclusively aimed at companies that are operating...
A lot has been written and said about how hit-driven the mobile game business has become over the last few years, but if the industry needed another bit of evidence, here it is: the market cap of Mixi (2121), Japan’s once biggest social network, has eclipsed that of Mobage operator DeNA...
Mixi (2121), Japan’s once largest social network , is back from the dead. In September 2006, Mixi was the first s0-called Web 2.0 startup ever to go IPO and managed to maintain its status as a large-cap company for years until it stopped innovating and was hit by a flood of competitors:...
Advertising mobile games on television doesn’t sound intuitive at this point in time, given the immaturity of the mobile gaming industry, the now less important position of TV as a marketing channel, high production costs for ads, inability to track effectiveness, problems in attributing user...
Social networking services in Japan never really put much emphasis on chatting for several reasons: even the biggest homegrown social network Mixi (2121) waited years before releasing such a feature in 2012. Mixi’s move was caused by the meteoric rise of LINE, and other social services...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry