By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
I am not seeing many Japanese social game developers jumping ship from Mobage or GREE to LINE, but LINE operator NHN Japan did a step in the right direction at the Tokyo Game Show 2012 (which ends tomorrow). The company signed a deal with Korea-based WeMade, under which WeMade will distribute a...
I said it before, and I say it again: DeNA needs many, many more games to call itself a “platform” outside Japan. Just over 50 titles on Mobage in English, for example, are not enough to be able to use that term in my view – especially since Mobage Global was launched 15 months...
GREE showcased a total of 34 titles at the Tokyo Game Show today – a pretty solid line-up with the only problem being that 33 of them were either available for a long time already (Doliland, Gang Domination, or Dragon Collection, to name just a few) or unveiled earlier (like Metal Gear Solid...
I had the chance to try out Metal Gear Solid Social Ops at the Tokyo Game Show today, the first social game that’s based on Konami’s hit franchise “Metal Gear”. Metal Gear Solid Social Ops was announced three weeks ago for GREE‘s global platform (release: in fall or...
Square Enix took a long time to finish for their latest social RPG, but at long last, Emperors Saga is now live on GREE for smartphones and feature phones. The game was announced exactly a year ago (even pre-registration started), but reportedly Square Enix wasn’t happy with the quality of...
Puzzle & Dragons, GungHo’s impossibly successful mobile social game, has finally made the move from iOS to Android. Released in the Japanese App Store back in February, the title is one of the first examples of a successful Japanese social game (on smartphones) that’s not distributed...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry