“Line Play”, the virtual world NHN Japan released in Japan back in November 2012 and that integrates with chat app LINE on smartphones, is now offering games. The first title is called “Tsuri Tomo”, hit LINE Play on Friday, and is currently available in Japanese only (the LINE-powered virtual world has been made available globally…
I was recently asked by Eric Seufert, marketing and mobile user acquisition specialist at Grey Area in Helsinki, to give an interview on Japan’s mobile and social gaming scene. Eric has an excellent blog, on which he analyzes various aspects of the mobile industry, most recently the gaming markets in China and South Korea. For…
There can be no discussion that in Japan, LINE is the king of chat apps at the moment. Maker NHN Japan, which now operates the service under a new company called LINE Corp., should be announcing 50 million domestic users very soon. If there is one competitor, it’s certainly Korean chat app KakaoTalk, which entered…
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…
NHN Japan today said that games offered on the in-app game platform on LINE have been downloaded a total of 100 million times so far. The company opened the app to game developers in July last year. Most of the titles on “LINE Game” have been doing extremely well – social shooter Dragon Flight and…
So far, LINE Game, the in-app gaming platform LINE operator NHN Japan launched last summer has been doing extremely well – most recently with Dragon Flight and Theater Town. And now it seems that NHN Japan is ready to step on the gas: the mega-popular original app has been advertised on national Japanese TV for…
Mega-popular chat app LINE added 2 more titles to its game platform, namely Dragon Flight and Theater Town. Dragon Flight is a shooting game made by Korean game maker Nextfloor. The company released the title last year in English actually – without using LINE or any other platform. Touch Arcade, for example, reviewed and liked…
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…