By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
Mega-popular communication app LINE has come a long way since launch in summer 2011 in Japan, with many people speculating about a possible IPO coming soon. And now the cat is out of the bag, it seems: Japanese business daily The Nikkei is reporting on its website it learned LINE Corp., the company...
You could call it a clever marketing idea, total nonsense or a sign of how mature the Japanese social gaming industry is, but the day has come: Japan has a credit card that’s connected to a mobile gaming platform, as DeNA (2432) has released a Mobage credit card today. To be more precise, the...
Five weeks ago, Japanese business daily The Nikkei ran a story according to which a total of 15 smartphone game makers in Japan are in the process of setting up a cross-promotion network. Under the service, the companies involved display ads for each other’s games, driving traffic to their...
If this becomes reality, this is surely one of the biggest developments in Japan’s mobile gaming scene in recent months. The country’s biggest business daily The Nikkei just reported on its website that a total of 15 Japanese mobile game makers are preparing to join forces in marketing...
Japan’s most popular smartphone game Puzzle & Dragons has been gaining one million registered users domestically every three weeks or so 15 times in a row to currently boast 17 million. Last month, maker GungHo (3765) said the title has over one million players in South Korea. But so far, the...
As a legacy of the feature phone era (which is not yet over), Japan is the only country in the world in which millions of people play games inside their smartphone browser – mostly on the GREE (3632) and DeNA (2432)-operated Mobage platforms. Devs over here are slowly but surely shifting to...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry