By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
BDNA, the joint venture that Mobage operator DeNA (2432) and Namco Bandai (7832) launched in 2011 and that was rebranded to BNDeNA in 2012, is ending on March 31 this year. The news isn’t coming as a big surprise, for a few reasons. First, BNDeNA has released pretty solid games such as Gundam...
GREE didn’t have a good last financial quarter, mainly because of a lack of strong games (that talk about kompu gacha shock after-effects, for example, is total nonsense). As a consequence, even Puzzle & Dragons maker GungHo is now worth more in terms of market cap. But some recent...
About 2 weeks ago, Bandai Namco revealed it is working on the first social game based on the popular Wizardry RPG series (which is especially popular in Japan). Dubbed “Wizardry – The Demon Tower Wars”, the F2P title is still scheduled to hit iPhone/iPod touch next month –...
Namco Bandai‘s social gaming business is doing very, very well: the company today announced it counts a total 30 million users across their social games offered on the Japanese market. There are various reasons for this success: Namco Bandai has partnerships with Mobage and GREE, usually uses...
In June, Bandai Namco caused quite a splash when the company announced a partnership with GREE under which a number of selected social games would be released on GREE’s Japanese and global platforms. (Before that, Bandai Namco inked a similar deal with Mobage in 2011, which was even refreshed in...
Mobage is seeing quite a few titles marketed as so-called “next-generation” social games lately: following social shooting game Macross SP Deculture and social RPG Valkyries In The Twilight, a new title called “Guilty Dragon” is supposed to help bring social games in Japan...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry