By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
A lot has been written and said about the status quo and future of Nintendo (7974) , after the company reported disastrous financial results about two weeks ago: introducing its own tablet, putting a successor to the Wii U on the fast track, buying a smartphone game maker, splitting into multiple...
BDNA, the joint venture that Mobage operator DeNA (2432) and Namco Bandai (7832) launched in 2011 and that was rebranded to BNDeNA in 2012, is ending on March 31 this year. The news isn’t coming as a big surprise, for a few reasons. First, BNDeNA has released pretty solid games such as Gundam...
Tokyo-based Colopl (3668), which I recently called “the biggest mobile game maker you never heard of”, is on a roll. Colopl’s market cap currently stands at US$3.4 billion, higher than that of Zynga (ZNGA, US$3.2 billion), DeNA (2432, US$3.1 billion), or GREE (3632, US$2.3 billion). Outside...
Advertising mobile games on television doesn’t sound intuitive at this point in time, given the immaturity of the mobile gaming industry, the now less important position of TV as a marketing channel, high production costs for ads, inability to track effectiveness, problems in attributing user...
Colopl (3668), the Tokyo-based company which I recently called “the biggest mobile game maker you never heard of”, is running from one milestone to the other. Last week, Colopl announced it has amassed a whopping 60 million registered users across its portfolio of games on iOS and...
One current trend to be observed Japan’s mobile gaming industry is that the era of the classic card battler genre is coming to an end. In its place, “classic” RPGs with a card battle and other social elements are starting to pop up as of late, often with impressive production...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry