By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
It’s been five days since Nintendo (7974) surprised the world with further details on its smartphone plans. The news made the rounds on October 29 and shares of both Nintendo and partner DeNA (2432) have been falling in recent days, but the dust is slowly beginning to settle now. This is a...
Nintendo (7974) gave a loud answer today to many people in the investor community and elsewhere who were skeptical about the company’s plans to enter the mobile market. I will not go into details of the announcement of Pokemon GO, as a lot of English-language websites already covered the news...
An app news site that gets listed? Japan is probably the only market in the world where this is possible, and it’s scheduled to happen on October 15. The country’s biggest such site AppBank was rumored to be an IPO candidate for quite a while now, and the eponymous startup behind it...
Mixi (2121) still hasn’t given an official reason why Apple pulled its mega hit Monster Strike from the Japanese App Store over the weekend (they are not obliged to), but the answer seems to be relatively simple. As I mentioned on Saturday (the day the app went offline), the official Monster...
Update: The app returned early Sunday morning Japanese time. Monster Strike, the current top mobile game in Japan in terms of sales, has disappeared from the Japanese App Store today (Saturday Japan time). It wasn’t operator Mixi (2121) that pulled the app, but it seems that Apple just...
Canceled games, ousted star designers, exposed (bad) work conditions: Konami (9766) has not really been producing good news since it announced restructuring efforts around spring this year. And in about two weeks, starting from September 10, Konami Digital Entertainment will close a total of 31...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry