By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
I am a hardcore user of Q&A service Quora where I just gave a detailed answer to this question: Will collectible cards game genre in mobile social games pick up in South East Asia? My answer: In Japan, by far the world’s biggest market for mobile social games, social card games (social...
Apart from gacha (and complete gacha in particular), real-money trading is another area for which Japan’s social gaming industry has been under fire in recent months. What is real-money trading? Real-money trading (RMT) describes a phenomenon under which virtual items are being sold for real...
MapleStory, the super hit MMORPG from Korea, was the basis for a social game released on the Mobage platform back in October 2011, MapleStory: Bokura No Boken (“Our Adventures”). And now GREE is getting a MapleStory-based title too. Dubbed “MapleStory – Brave Monsters”, the new...
Tokyo-based Klab played a major role in the “kompu gacha” shock story that rocked the Japanese social game industry in the last week. The company is one of Japan’s biggest 3rd-party social game makers and developed titles on Mobage, Yahoo-Mobage, Mixi, GREE, and Nico Nico Douga...
One question a lot of people are asking me frequently is how and why the social gaming industry in Japan has exploded over the last few years. There are a quite a few reasons for the expansion of the business, and one of them is the usage of good old TV commercials. In sharp contrast to the US and...
Konami, which operates a number of popular social games on GREE and Mobage (with Dragon Collection being the top title), published its financial report for fiscal 2012 today. Mainly driven by a total of over 20 million users playing Konami-made social games in Japan, the company was able to grow...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry