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…
I put together the following article for Social Casino Intelligence, the biggest publication covering the global social casino industry. The link to the online version of the original piece is here. The US$5 billion social gaming market in Japan is unique in many ways, but one of the most striking differences is that casino games…
GREE continues to step on the gas: after securing a number of promising games, announcing a partnership with Yahoo, and expanding its merchandising business, the company today said it entered a joint venture with Ameba operator CyberAgent. This is remarkable, as a) CyberAgent is a top provider of social games itself, b) operates an Ameba-powered…
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…
It’s now safer than ever to call web conglomerate CyberAgent, which runs a whole range of services from online advertising to social networks and virtual worlds, “successful” in gaming, too. The Ameba operator is counting a whopping 30 million (registered) social game users across its entire portfolio. That milestone was passed on March 5 and…
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…
DeNA, GREE, KLab, Voltage, Index, A-team, Crooz… the list of publicly traded social gaming companies in Japan is about to get longer. Tokyo-based enish has announced it filed with the Tokyo Stock Exchange to go public at the Mothers section for startups on December 11 (ticker: 3667). The company was established under the name Synphonie in February…
There is already a social gaming platform embedded in Japan’s real-identity social network Mixi (on both the PC and mobile versions), but that’s apparently no reason not to open a second one. Dubbed mixi Park, the new social gaming platform was launched today by Mixi itself and Konami. Needless to say, a Mixi membership is required…