By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
You could call it a clever marketing idea, total nonsense or a sign of how mature the Japanese social gaming industry is, but the day has come: Japan has a credit card that’s connected to a mobile gaming platform, as DeNA (2432) has released a Mobage credit card today. To be more precise, the...
Five weeks ago, Japanese business daily The Nikkei ran a story according to which a total of 15 smartphone game makers in Japan are in the process of setting up a cross-promotion network. Under the service, the companies involved display ads for each other’s games, driving traffic to their...
Mobage operator DeNA (2432) took the wraps off a new first-party game yesterday, a social 3D RPG called “Magic & Cannon”. The game will become available in the form of a smartphone app for the Japanese Mobage platform on iOS and Android “soon” (users can pre-register...
If this becomes reality, this is surely one of the biggest developments in Japan’s mobile gaming scene in recent months. The country’s biggest business daily The Nikkei just reported on its website that a total of 15 Japanese mobile game makers are preparing to join forces in marketing...
Japan’s Mobile Content Forum (MCF) has issued a new report that includes a number of interesting statistics on this country’s mobile industry. According to the MCF, Japan’s market for mobile gaming reached roughly US$5.1 billion in 2012. I translated the key information of the...
As a legacy of the feature phone era (which is not yet over), Japan is the only country in the world in which millions of people play games inside their smartphone browser – mostly on the GREE (3632) and DeNA (2432)-operated Mobage platforms. Devs over here are slowly but surely shifting to...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry