By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
There’s a new tech IPO in Japan: Online timetable service Ekitan (fee-based on mobile phones) will get listed in Tokyo: An online train timetable service that goes IPO? It may sound ludicrous to people living outside Japan, but Tokyo-based Ekitan is doing exactly that. The company will be...
GREE has finally announced it will enter the social gaming market in China. Tencent, the world’s third-largest web company by market cap, will be GREE’s partner. That’s a spectacular move and sign that it becomes harder and harder for GREE to expand the mobile social games...
Big news from Japan’s social gaming world today: Mixi just announced Grenge, a joint venture to be launched with CyberAgent (Ameba), to produce social games: Japan’s social apps boom isn’t ending: Today, two of the country’s biggest web companies, namely Mixi and CyberAgent, announced they...
GREE accelerates its smartphone development. The mobile social games company just announced 15 new games by third-party developers have been added to its Android/iPhone-optimized mobile website. Partners include companies like Sega, gumi and Tonchidot (full list in Japanese here). More information...
DeNA today announced it will make it possible for the 2 million users of Yahoo Mobage, its PC-based social games platform run with Yahoo Japan, to pay via online banking. The obvious goal is to remove friction for players paying real money for virtual in-game or avatar-related items (and to boost...
Japanese web company Nifty (3828) plans to capitalize on Japan’s social games market boom. Nifty today said it will help local social game developers to offer their titles outside Japan. Services will include cloud computing and support in local payment solutions, translations and advertising...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry