By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
DeNA has announced that Mobage will be pre-installed on Sharp’s next Android cell phone, the so-called AQUOS PHONE THE HYBRID 101SH. The phone is part of mobile carrier SoftBank’s fall and winter line-up this year. As you can see in the picture below, Android 2.3 is baked into a...
Yahoo Mobage, the PC-based social gaming platform on Yahoo Japan, has reached 6 million users. The joint venture was set up by Yahoo Japan and DeNA in October 2010. It took Yahoo Mobage: 51 days to get to the first million members 53 more days to add another one million another 61 days to reach 3...
CyberAgent‘s hit virtual world Ameba Pigg is seeing success outside Japan: according to Gamebusiness.jp, Ameba Pico (Pigg’s name in non-Japanese markets) just hit the 4 million user mark. The game news portal is citing CyberAgent’s official Twitter account. The super-cute virtual...
There are industry reports from a number of Japan-based investment banks available out there, and everyone sees the market size of the domestic social gaming market differently. For analysts, investors, and everyone else interested in such data, one alternative is the analysis from Enterbrain, a...
Big win for GREE today: EA Sports has brought social game FIFA World Class Soccer to GREE on Japanese feature phones and smartphones (pre-registration actually started a while ago). FIFA World Class Soccer has been co-developed with Tokyo-based gumi, one of the biggest third-party social game...
DeNA is pretty strong in securing anime-based social games for Mobage, and One Piece, announced by Bandai Namco today, might be their biggest game of that kind so far (the One Piece manga and anime are easily among the most valuable IP a company can own in these areas at the moment). The full title...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry