By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
DeNA today announced it will make it possible for the 2 million users of Yahoo Mobage, its PC-based social games platform run with Yahoo Japan, to pay via online banking. The obvious goal is to remove friction for players paying real money for virtual in-game or avatar-related items (and to boost...
DeNA today announced a new way to monetize its mobile social gaming platform Mobage-town: monthly subscriptions for virtual items. The aim here is make it easier for Mobage-town users to spend money on virtual items for avatars and inside games: instead of paying per item, DeNA’s new...
It was reported today that DeNA (Mobage-town) plans to launch its social gaming platform in China late February this year. COO Isao Moriyasu said in an interview that Mobage-town in China will begin with 20-30 game development partners. DeNA already has a presence in the Chinese gaming market...
There are many examples, but these came to my mind right now. 1) Twitter: Twitter has been growing at a spectacular pace in 2010 in Japan. They now have well over 10 million users, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the real number would be closer to 15 million (Twitter isn’t providing...
Yahoo Mobage, the PC social games platform run by Yahoo Japan and DeNA (Mobage-town), is continuing to grow nicely. Today it was reported that Yahoo Mobage now has 2 million users. The first million users were counted after 51 days, while it took Yahoo Mobage to get a second million in 53 days. 68%...
Major Japanese tech blog TechWave is today running a story on how Japan’s social games market has evolved from 2009 to 2010 and how it will grow until 2014. According to Seed Planning, the market research company behind the analysis, Japan’s social game market grew 305% from 2009 to 2010...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry