By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
I always thought I have seen a lot of craziness in Japan’s mobile game industry over the last 5 years, but the Puzzle & Dragons boom in Japan is starting to scare me. Today, at the Osaka Stock Exchange, the market cap of maker GungHo rose 19.7% to hit a staggering US$4.6 billion...
Sony sure seems to be in need of a lot of cash at the moment. In the last few days and weeks, the company sold off: the Sony Building in New York for US$1.1 billion the Sony City Osaki Building in Tokyo for US$1.2 billion and a portion of its stake in online medical service subsidiary M3 Inc. for...
GREE didn’t have a good last financial quarter, mainly because of a lack of strong games (that talk about kompu gacha shock after-effects, for example, is total nonsense). As a consequence, even Puzzle & Dragons maker GungHo is now worth more in terms of market cap. But some recent...
Japan’s top smartphone game Puzzle & Dragons continues to amaze. I don’t want to hype the RPG/Puzzle hybrid even more here, but I do think it’s definitely noteworthy that maker GungHo’s market cap is going through the roof. To recap, I wrote four weeks ago that the...
Puzzle & Dragons, Japan’s top smartphone game, now counts 9 million users: the puzzle/RPG hybrid actually reached that milestone on February 18, just a few days after hitting 8 million downloads late last month. The chart below, compiled by Social Game Info, shows how Puzzle & Dragons grew...
Capcom has released “Everybody’s Onimusha Card Master” (Minna To Onimusha Card Master) on Mobage in Japan, the first mobile social game in the 11-year old Onimusha franchise. With the exception of “Onimusha Soul”, the latest entry in the series (a browser-based RPG for...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry