Here is a presentation I gave a few days ago in Tokyo on Japan’s social and mobile gaming industry. It’s dubbed “Social Games In Japan 2013: Status Quo, Trends And Internationalization”, and it covers exactly what the title suggests. (I need to add that nobody in the audience belonged to the gaming industry – everyone…
This isn’t directly related to games, but it’s an area that I am personally looking at very closely for my clients and something I think is worth sharing: Ameba operator and social game maker CyberAgent released a new report on the status quo and future of Japan’s smartphone ad market. Not surprisingly, the company (which…
Japan’ social networking space has surely changed a lot in the last 2 years. There can be no doubt that chat app LINE (released in the summer of 2011) is the undisputed king in this area in Japan, boasting over 40 million domestic users. At the same time, Japan’s once biggest real-identity social network Mixi…
“Line Play”, the virtual world NHN Japan released in Japan in November and that integrates with chat app LINE, is now available worldwide. Over here, Line Play can be called a competitor to Ameba Pigg, the popular virtual world operated by CyberAgent on PCs and smartphones. NHN Japan explains: LINE Play avatars can be created…
Japanese business daily The Nikkei is reporting that GREE is to start a paid newsletter service called Magari as early as tomorrow (Tuesday, February 19). The newsletter will not focus on games but on Japanese celebrities: apparently, subscribers can expect original content in the form of text, video, voice, and pictures. What may sound weird…
Big shake-up at Tokyo-based NHN Japan today: the LINE operator and Japanese subsidiary of Korean web powerhouse NHN is splitting up into 2 different companies. The basic idea is to separate the gaming from the web service business. NHN Japan says that going forward its gaming section will operate under “Hangame Corp.” (tentative). The new…
NHN Japan is continuing to turn its super-popular messenger app LINE into a platform (or portal) for mobile content of any kind. After games, a set of social networking features, horoscopes, a greeting card app, a drawing app, and a camera app, coupons, an in-app virtual world, and content for kids, it’s now time for…
It took NHN Japan a bit longer than they wanted, but today it happened: super-popular messenger app LINE has passed the 100 million user mark (the original plan was to get there by the end of last year). The company was very clever in initiating a countdown marketing/PR campaign earlier this week to make sure…