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…
Japanese business daily The Nikkei recently published a story on the PS4 in which it showed a chart that compares the sales of social games with those of console games (hard- and software) in Japan since 2007/2008. I found it interesting enough to post it below. It visualizes the unbelievable growth that social gaming companies…
DeNA just announced a “business alliance” with Mixi under which the Mobage operator and Japan’s biggest homegrown social network will share the same game development platform starting as early as January 2013. DeNA explains: Beginning January 2013, developers can create their games on a single development platform and distribute them to both social graphs in…
It took a while, but the multi-billion dollar Japanese social gaming industry finally has its own association, named JASGA (Japan Social Game Association). JASGA’s establishment has (no doubt) been accelerated by the kompu gacha shock that hit the industry in May, followed by public pressure and the calling for regulation and control of the industry….
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…
Mixi has released its financial report for the second quarter of fiscal 2012, and it looks like the company’s actual situation is better than its current image in Japan. Sales and profit have gone up year-on-year as follows, but most of the key financial numbers went sideways or south quarter-on-quarter: Mixi says that for the…
What I have always found extremely weird about Mixi was that Japan’s biggest home-grown social networking site never offered a decent chat function. For years and years, they never seemed to care. But it seems that the meteoric rise of Facebook and chat app LINE in Japan has put so much pressure on Mixi that the…
Tokyo-based KLab announced today that the number of registered users playing their social games crossed the 20 million mark at the end of September. The company offers around two dozen different titles across Mobage, Mixi, GREE, the App Store and Google Play (direct), and the soon to be released Bushimo mobile gaming platform. Its first…