By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
In Japan, a title called “Kaito Royale” is often credited with having kick-started the social gaming boom in this country as a whole. The first-party game – which works much like Mafia Wars – from DeNA was launched on Mobage in October 2009, and is still very, very popular...
GREE continues to step on the gas: after securing a number of promising games, announcing a partnership with Yahoo, and expanding its merchandising business, the company today said it entered a joint venture with Ameba operator CyberAgent. This is remarkable, as a) CyberAgent is a top provider of...
Growth in Japan’s social gaming market is starting to slow down, competition is increasing, and internationalization isn’t going as well as expected. So what can you do as a mobile game platform provider? While Mobage operator DeNA continues to do m-commerce and started branching out...
Tokyo-based game maker Aiming released Kingdom Corps on Google Play, the English-language version of the Japanese hit “Lord Of Knights”. The social RPG/strategy hybrid has been downloaded over 400,000 times in Japan (and perhaps more importantly, it has been monetizing very well, too)...
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...
It’s now safer than ever to call web conglomerate CyberAgent, which runs a whole range of services from online advertising to social networks and virtual worlds, “successful” in gaming, too. The Ameba operator is counting a whopping 30 million (registered) social game users across...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry