By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
DeNA‘s Kaito Royale isn’t only successful on Mobage, the company’s own platform. It’s also available – and very popular – on Mixi, Japan’s largest real identity social network. In fact, Gamebiz reports that the game hit 6,007,985 users today, at 11am JST...
Registered users≠active users≠paying users: Mixi is about to lose three social games (on its PC platform) with more than 700,000 or even one million registered players each. Apart from RockYou Asia’s Speed Racing (about 720,000 registered players on September 16), Happy Aquarium by Drecom...
First Zynga Japan shuts down 2 social games on Mixi, then Playfish/EA does the same with Restaurant City, and now it’s RockYou Asia‘s turn: American social game makers are having a hard time in Japan (hint: don’t come here if you don’t have anything unique to offer). And...
Japan’s social games market is lucrative, big and growing, but it’s a tough nut to crack for many foreign game developers, even the successful ones. One case in point is Zynga Japan, which decided to shut down the Japanese versions of Farmville And Treasure Isle in July after it turned...
DeNA did it for Mobage back in February, now Mixi is following: it’s now possible for subscribers to KDDI au using Mixi on Android phones to make payments via “KDDI au Kantan Kessai”. This mobile settlement service makes it possible to pay for Mixi points, Mixi’s virtual...
Earlier this week, Japan’s biggest real-identity social network Mixi changed two things on its website: First, Mixi introduced a new logo, as you can see on the picture below: Second, Mixi launched a new feature, Mixi Pages, which works much like Facebook pages: individuals, companies...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry