By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
What I learned is that many people in the social gaming industry outside Japan don’t know that GREE and Mobage operator DeNA have actually been running multiple platforms in Japan over the last few years, not just one. Apart from Yahoo Mobage on the PC, these are GREE and Mobage on: Japanese...
This is getting weird: just 24 hours after entering a new partnership with GREE, Yahoo Japan announced today that it’s ready to strengthen the existing partnership with GREE’s arch enemy, Mobage operator DeNA. This “double play” (as Pocketgamer puts it) is not only a great...
Japan’s most successful smartphone game Puzzle & Dragons is finally available in the US App Store, as tweeted out by GungHo America earlier today. The free-to-play mix between RPG and puzzle game can (and should, if I may add) be downloaded by clicking here. GungHo announced the release in...
It took a while, but the multi-billion dollar Japanese social gaming industry finally has its own association, named JASGA (Japan Social Game Association). JASGA’s establishment has (no doubt) been accelerated by the kompu gacha shock that hit the industry in May, followed by public pressure...
I think that this week is the busiest in Japan’s social gaming industry since May this year (when the kompu gacha shock hit), there is just so much going on. Today’s big news: GREE announced a comprehensive business partnership with Yahoo Japan, the country’s (by far) biggest web...
DeNA, GREE, KLab, Voltage, Index, A-team, Crooz… the list of publicly traded social gaming companies in Japan is about to get longer. Tokyo-based enish has announced it filed with the Tokyo Stock Exchange to go public at the Mothers section for startups on December 11 (ticker: 3667). The...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry