By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
LINE continues to amaze. Just a few weeks after hitting 40 million downloads, NHN Japan’s social app passed the 50 million mark (on July 26 Japanese time, to be exact). LINE was first released in the Japanese App Store on June 23, 2011. It took 399 days to go from zero to 50 million...
JOGA, the Japan Online Game Association, has released a summary of a new report on the status quo of Japan’s online gaming industry (as usual, the study is available only in Japanese). Following the study from the Japanese government from a few days ago, the JOGA report also sizes up the...
Business daily The Nikkei reports that GREE‘s operating profit for the April-June 2012 quarter has dropped by 20% q-o-q to around US$255 million. That would still be an increase of over 100% y-o-y (and an incredible number by itself), but the number would mean that GREE saw, for the first...
It took them a while, but DeNA in Tokyo announced that Mobage on iOS launched in South Korea on Monday (note: I can only read the press release in Japanese, and there is no English version). DeNA’s entry into Korea was first announced back in November 2011. Just like in the case of...
Japan is probably the only country in the world where even TV stations produce social games (more on that at a later time). But sometimes even this nation’s mighty broadcasters need support, and today GREE announced a pretty interesting deal with Tokyo-based broadcaster Fuji TV. Under the...
What’s the size of Japan’s social gaming market? I am constantly monitoring sources from Japan that try to answer this question, and I published some of the results the last time here or as an infographic here (note: I don’t publish all the results I find publicly). Now...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry