By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
It took them a bit longer than Konami, but now Namco Bandai also owns the bragging rights of having 10 million registered users on social games on the Japanese market. The company announced it has reached the milestone on January 12. According to Namco Bandai, their three Gundam–based social...
Tokyo-based (and listed) social game maker Index announced that Persona 3 Social, the social version of the classic RPG series, has crossed the 1 million user mark. The players are spread over Persona 3 Social on Mobage (feature phone only), GREE (smartphone and feature phone), and Yahoo Mobage on...
DeNA was able to report a nice win when they got Square Enix to release the first social game version of Final Fantasy on Mobage for feature phones earlier this month. At that point, DeNA said a smartphone version is under development, which usually means it will take weeks or months to come out...
Following a disappointing financial report, Japanese video game maker Cave announced it will focus more on social games going forward. The company has an 18-year old history and is especially famous for its shoot’em ups aimed at a hardcore gamer audience (personally, I am a big fan)...
Another Japanese triple A video game brand is going social: it took a bit longer than announced last month, but Square Enix started offering Final Fantasy Brigade on Mobage today, a social game based on the super-popular RPG franchise. DeNA actually announced the title first back in October last...
The Nikkei just reported in its online edition that GREE will probably hit US$520 million in sales last quarter (three months through December 31). As if this wasn’t impressive enough, the paper says GREE is expecting operating profit to balloon to US$260 million. If the report turns out to...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry