By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
So far, Japan’s biggest social network Mixi was OK with users showing handles instead of real names on the site- and the vast majority of users has been using nick names, indeed (privacy on Japan’s web is a sensitive topic). Mixi hasn’t changed this policy, but a few days ago...
Video game maker Square Enix released another social game yesterday, a social RPG called Gleipnora. The title is exclusively available on Mobage for Japanese feature phones. In the game, players take on the rule of a newly enrolled student in a “school for magicians” called Valheriar...
Tokyo-based social gaming company Rekoo Japan (the parent company has its HQ in China) has released a new game on Mixi, dubbed “Tsukuro! Densha Town” (“Let’s build a train town”). The maker of mega hit game Sunshine Ranch is conducting some kind of “test...
CyberAgent, through its subsidiary CyberAgent Ventures (Beijing) Investment Consulting Co., made yet another investment: this time, the company acquired a 25% stake in smartphone game maker EpicForcc Entertainment. Details of the deal weren’t disclosed, but CyberAgent was apparently...
Kakaku has released traffic information on its biggest properties for June 2011, their namesake price comparison site (and Japan’s largest) and restaurant guide (and Gourmet Navigator competitor) Tabelog. And according to the report, both Kakaku and Tabelog grew significantly on a year-on...
Bloomberg posted a pretty weird video report on GREE on their website today. The report makes it look like the reporter had an interview with GREE CEO Yoshikazu Tanaka, but Tanaka himself can be seen speaking in the report for only 10 seconds or so. The main bullet point here is that GREE...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry