By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
Social games on Facebook aren’t a big topic in Japan at the moment, but Zynga Japan has announced it translated one of the parent company’s biggest hits, Empires & Allies, into Japanese. The game has so far been available in English, French, Italian, Spanish, German, and seven other...
Tokyo-based (and newly listed) social game maker Klab is entering the venture capital business. The company’s newly launched subsidiary Klab Ventures has announced it will establish a VC firm together with major Japanese VC SBI Investment this month. Both partners will hold a 50% stake in the...
It took them a while, but Capcom has finally rolled out the smartphone version of Biohazard Outbreak Survive on GREE (Biohazard is the Japanese brand name for Resident Evil, Capcom’s super-popular horror action game series). The social game version was first launched on GREE for Japanese...
Tokyo-based Index has announced the launch of MissionGate, which is “France’s first social gaming” platform, according to the company. Why would a Japanese mobile contents provider open such a platform in France of all places? The answer is simple: back in 2004, Index bought a...
The number isn’t impressive as Konami’s, but Tecmo Koei is now counting a total of five million registered players for their social games offered on GREE, Mobage, and Yahoo Mobage. The “traditional” video game maker is seeing a 27% profit margin in the online and mobile...
Fired up by healthy sales numbers last quarter, Konami is continuing to churn out social games: the company announced BE-BOP-HIGHSCHOOL for Mobage on feature phones (official website). The new title is based on a Japanese high school manga from the 1980s – and it’s yet another social...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry