By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
DeNA, GREE, KLab, Voltage, Index, A-team, Crooz… the list of publicly traded social gaming companies in Japan is about to get longer. Tokyo-based enish has announced it filed with the Tokyo Stock Exchange to go public at the Mothers section for startups on December 11 (ticker: 3667). The...
There is already a social gaming platform embedded in Japan’s real-identity social network Mixi (on both the PC and mobile versions), but that’s apparently no reason not to open a second one. Dubbed mixi Park, the new social gaming platform was launched today by Mixi itself and Konami...
Popular virtual world Ameba Pigg hit 13.1 million users in July, maker CyberAgent announced today (the number was actually revealed in the Q3 report already). Ameba Pigg, which is known as Ameba Pico outside Japan, had 10 million users in September 2011 and 12 million in April 2012. It launched in...
Quite a few financial results from social gaming companies are due in the next days, and CyberAgent is the first company to report (for the April-June 2012 quarter). In a nutshell, sales and operating profit were up, but the Japanese web powerhouse missed expectations from analysts – and got...
As its Ameba-based social gaming platform is around the corner, CyberAgent sure needs some creative firepower to be able to develop as many games internally as possible. The company announced that it invested in Hoolai, a Beijing-based game developer that’s backed by Sequoia China, Greylock...
14-year old CyberAgent is close to a radical transformation of one its main pillars of business, the Ameba platform. Over the years, Ameba has transformed itself from a pure blogging platform on PCs and feature phones to a cross-service platform (using a single log-in approach) and successfully...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry