By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
Mobage in the US absolutely needs more games if it wants to continue to call itself a platform. It’s been over a year after launching the English-language platform on Android (and later on iOS), and the number of titles is still well below 100 – and many of them are first-party games...
Rage Of Bahamut is being advertised on Japanese TV again. As I previously mentioned, TV commercials for social games are not really rare in this country, especially for the Mobage and GREE platforms and selected individual titles. Rage Of Bahamut’s first TV commercial was broadcast in...
One of the key elements that gives Japan’s mobile social gaming platforms Mobage and GREE their “identity” is the concept of the virtual social graph. Simply put, the idea is to offer up a social environment in which the people the player interacts with are (mostly) strangers in...
It took them a while, but Mobage operator DeNA has passed GREE in terms of quarterly sales again. Both companies have just released their financial reports for the April-June quarter: while GREE hit 40 billion yen (US$510 million) in sales in that time frame, DeNA was able to pull in 47.6 billion...
Rage Of Bahamut is getting a Korean version. Just like with the Japanese original and the English-language follow-up, maker Cygames has chosen Mobage as the distribution platform. DeNA and their local partner Daum, a major online portal, have started offering Rage Of Bahamut on the jointly operated...
Gacha, the biggest money-making mechanic in Japan’s social gaming industry, is about to get transformed radically. A sub-form of this electronic draw concept, “kompu gacha” (or “complete gacha”), was regulated by the Japanese government a few weeks ago. The kompu gacha...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry