By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
How much money can be made in mobile social card battle games? Assuming that no makers are gaming the system, it seems like quite a lot. In Japan, well over 70% of the top 20 games on Mobage and GREE belong to this genre (or at least have a card-collecting element in them). There is no end in...
Good news coming from the world’s biggest mobile market are sparse so far (to say the least), but DeNA isn’t letting go of China. Far from it. Japan’s largest mobile carrier NTT Docomo (about 60 million subscribers) announced it has established a joint venture with China’s...
Tokyo-based social game maker (and Sega partner) Pokelabo has released “Mystic Monsters” on Tuesday, a social card battle game for iOS and Android. Set on the island of Atlantis, Mystic Monsters is being pitched as a “dark fantasy RPG” that allows players to form guilds to...
Big news from DeNA today, and I’ll get right to it: the company just officially announced in Japan that Mobage now connects with Facebook. This is huge. The press release is relatively curt (and available in Japanese only), as this isn’t exactly great news for DeNA (I’ll come to...
Unity and social card battle games: not exactly two terms that have been used very often in one sentence – so far. But Tokyo-based Rozetta has now used the game engine to create Dare Demo Hero (Everybody’s A Hero), a “3D Hero Card Game” for GREE on Android (Google Play). The...
NHN Japan’s super-successful messenger app LINE (45 million downloads in less than a year), which is soon to be turned into a platform, has its first game out. And LINE Birzzle is an instant hit. The puzzle game has actually been released by South Korea-based enfeel a while ago (product...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry