By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
DeNA is pretty strong in securing anime-based social games for Mobage, and One Piece, announced by Bandai Namco today, might be their biggest game of that kind so far (the One Piece manga and anime are easily among the most valuable IP a company can own in these areas at the moment). The full title...
It’s an old wisdom in the video game industry: platforms go nowhere without so-called “killer” titles. Mobage in English on Android has a few solid titles (that do well), but that killer game is missing. In the US, ngmoco is working on a bunch of new, original and Mobage exclusive...
DeNA has announced an interesting move to enter Korea today: Mobage Korea will be established in the gaming- and mobile-crazy nation via Daum, one of the country’s biggest web portals (yes, portals are still popular in Asia). The deal was done through DeNA Seoul, a subsidiary DeNA set up in...
How have ARPU and sales of DeNA and GREE changed over the last months? Japanese blog “Shares” has created two handy charts that show how these metrics developed from 2008, and I translated them below. This chart shows the ARPU for DeNA (Mobage) and GREE between 2008 and today. If this...
Recently IPO’d social gaming company Klab announced that Captain Tsubasa, a soccer-themed social game, has hit the 1.5 million user mark. The title is part of a bigger trend in Japan, namely using famous anime and manga brands as a thematic and graphic background for social games. In the case...
Capcom isn’t the only Japanese video game maker seeing growth in its social games segment: Konami has posted the results for the first half of their current fiscal year (2012), and this is how things look for Konami as a whole: Sales for social games (SNS games) jumped from 65 to US$216...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry