I am a hardcore user of Q&A service Quora where I just gave a detailed answer to this question: Will collectible cards game genre in mobile social games pick up in South East Asia? My answer: In Japan, by far the world’s biggest market for mobile social games, social card games (social card battle games…
Apart from gacha (and complete gacha in particular), real-money trading is another area for which Japan’s social gaming industry has been under fire in recent months. What is real-money trading? Real-money trading (RMT) describes a phenomenon under which virtual items are being sold for real money, usually off-platform. Most of the transactions are known to…
MapleStory, the super hit MMORPG from Korea, was the basis for a social game released on the Mobage platform back in October 2011, MapleStory: Bokura No Boken (“Our Adventures”). And now GREE is getting a MapleStory-based title too. Dubbed ”MapleStory – Brave Monsters”, the new game has nothing to do with the Mobage title. Nexon has teamed up with GREE and…
Tokyo-based Klab played a major role in the “kompu gacha” shock story that rocked the Japanese social game industry in the last week. The company is one of Japan’s biggest 3rd-party social game makers and developed titles on Mobage, Yahoo-Mobage, Mixi, GREE, and Nico Nico Douga. KLab got listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Mothers Index in September last year and reported yesterday it…
One question a lot of people are asking me frequently is how and why the social gaming industry in Japan has exploded over the last few years. There are a quite a few reasons for the expansion of the business, and one of them is the usage of good old TV commercials. In sharp contrast…
Konami, which operates a number of popular social games on GREE and Mobage (with Dragon Collection being the top title), published its financial report for fiscal 2012 today. Mainly driven by a total of over 20 million users playing Konami-made social games in Japan, the company was able to grow revenue year-on-year to US$3.3 billion…
In the aftermath of the “kompu gacha shock” that hit Japan’s social gaming industry hard yesterday, shares of GREE and Mobage operator DeNA rebounded today at the Tokyo Stock Exchange, after opening bid-only. It was the first time in four trading days for the two companies to see a plus – between Monday and Wednesday,…
Earthquake in Japan’s social gaming industry today: a council of six major Japanese companies in this space today announced they will abolish the controversial “kompu gacha” (complete gacha) function from all of their titles by the end of May. No new games offering the mechanic will be allowed to be published on the major gaming platforms…