By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
How long will Japan’s social card battle game boom last? My prediction is that Japanese players will start having enough of this genre in 12-18 months – there are simply too many of these games around, and they all work the same way (see here for my explanation of social card game...
Nice win for DeNA today: Sega’s legendary fighting game series Virtua Fighter (that really is the correct spelling) is going social. “Virtua Fighter Cool Champ” (awful title) launched today on Mobage for Japanese feature phones. Virtua Fighter Cool Champ is a social card battle...
Mobage is getting a pretty good-looking social horror RPG: Square Enix has started distributing “Sokotsune Underworld” on Mobage for Japanese feature phones today. The game is using Cthulhu, the famous fictional divinity created by H.P. Lovecraft, as the background for the story. In the...
DeNA‘s US company ngmoco recently laid off 30 people, TechCrunch and Inside Mobile Apps are reporting. According to TechCrunch, the group includes “senior leaders including a director of platform tech and the chief marketing officer”. The same blog is reporting that one game has...
It’s not a secret that GREE has been outpacing DeNA in recent months: the market cap today at the Tokyo Stock Exchange for DeNA stood at US$4.9 billion (DeNA stock soared today), while GREE reached US$7.8 billion. Nikkei Online has tried to visualize the race between the two rivals in recent...
Action social games are pretty rare – reason enough for me to highlight a new entry in this genre in Japan, “Shuriken Smaaash” from Tokyo-based developer Nijibox. Another reason the game stands out is that it has been released on Mobage in the form of native apps, for Android and...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry