By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
Last month, I attended an event in San Francisco entitled “Social Networks and Games: Transition from Web to Mobile in Japan and the US” when I spent a few days in California. The event, which was organized by the local office of the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO) was very...
I spent the last 14 days in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and during that time, these major Japanese social networking/social gaming companies published financial reports (links to all PDFs in English):
CyberAgent: 3Q FY2011
Mixi: 1Q, FY2011
GREE: 4Q, FY2011
DeNA: 1Q, FY2011
I tried talking quite a few social gaming companies from the US and other places out of entering the Japanese market in recent months, simply because they didn’t have unique, defendable IP or other strong selling points for their games. Now even the biggest social gaming company of them all...
So far, Japan’s biggest social network Mixi was OK with users showing handles instead of real names on the site- and the vast majority of users has been using nick names, indeed (privacy on Japan’s web is a sensitive topic). Mixi hasn’t changed this policy, but a few days ago...
Tokyo-based social gaming company Rekoo Japan (the parent company has its HQ in China) has released a new game on Mixi, dubbed “Tsukuro! Densha Town” (“Let’s build a train town”). The maker of mega hit game Sunshine Ranch is conducting some kind of “test...
CyberAgent continues to expand its social gaming business: the company announced “Oide yo! Ramenya-san” for Mixi today, a ramen restaurant simulation. It’s actually the second game of its kind for CyberAgent: there’s also a very similar ramen restaurant simulation on Mobage...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry