By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
Japan’s social gaming industry is maturing and continues to mix with the video gaming sector: Sega has announced it has entered a capital tie-up and that it will jointly develop social games with Tokyo-based startup Pokelabo. Details are scarce (financials, for example, weren’t...
Nice win for DeNA today: partner Namco Bandai today announced [PDF] that it will bring two of its hit video game series to Mobage. The first game is the far more important one: “Tales Of Kizna” is the first social game in the 16-year old “Tales” series of RPGS. Kizna is a...
It seems there is still VC money available to flow into the social games market in Japan (Asia): Singapore-based social gaming startup Nubee, a subsidiary of Tokyo-based Vega, raised 1 billion yen (US$13 million) from JAFCO, TechCrunch Japan reported earlier today. JAFCO is one of Japan’s...
I have been preaching for months that Japan’s social gaming giants DeNA and GREE will have a hard time replicating their enormous success outside Japan, and now JP Morgan in Tokyo has released a report pointing out the trouble that DeNA in particular is seeing currently. To be more specific...
DeNA just announced that MapleStory, the super hit MMORPG from Korean publisher Nexon, is now available on Mobage in the form of a mobile social game. The Mobage version, dubbed MapleStory: Bokura No Boken (“Our Adventures”), is playable on Mobage for Japanese feature phones only at this point...
Bandai Namco announced [PDF] that one of their titles on GREE, Gundam-based Sci-Fi social game Gundam Masters, has hit 1 million registered users on October 3. What’s interesting is that the game was released just on September 1, meaning it added an impressive 1,262 players per hour since...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry