Japanese tower defense game apps "Battle Cats" becomes the boom calmly

Japanese mobile game apps developer Ponos announced that their tower defense game apps for smartphones "Battle Cats(にゃんこ大戦争)"  broke through 4M downloading.

Battle Cats is the defense game that individual cats appear. Players operate various cats, invade in each area of Japan and aim at the control in Japan. The iOS version of this was released on November 15, 2012, and the Android version was released on December 27. Then this updates a milestone every month.


Charm of this is mysterious artwork. Cats are simple designs, but are slightly different from Japanese-style Kawaii with a wonder in some way. They express it by the word "Kimo-kawa". This is the coined word that combined Kawaii(Cute) with Kimochiwarui(Grotesquerie). Is it be "Grotes-cute" if I transcribe it in English? Anyway, these cats are very attractive!

GREE CEO Tanaka and DeNA CEO Moriyasu becomes a director of Japan's Computer Entertainment Supplier's Association

The social game is holding the game industry of Japan. Today, Japan's Computer Entertainment Supplier's Association(CESA) announced that GREE CEO Yoshikazu Tanaka and DeNA CEO Isao Moriyasu becomes a director. It is decided officially in a regular meeting of CESA held in the end of May.

It is rare that 2 directors are added newly at a time. According to CESA, this is measures to cope with the expansion of the social game market in the Japanese game industry. CESA is a sponsor of Tokyo Game Show(TGS), and, in TGS of the last year, a social games were the leading role.

See Also:
[Report of Tokyo Game Show 2012] The conqueror of the game market of Japan is a mobile social game

How will about TGS of this year?

Big News: Softbank Mobile to acquire majority shares of game developer Gungho Online Entertainment

Japanese mobile company Softbank Mobile announced that they would tender an offer of online game company Gungho Online Entertainment.

Originally Gungho was a company running online games, but grows up by a mobile social game recently. Particularly, "Puzzle & Dragons" and "Keri-Hime Sweets" were popular, and the sales of their February exceeded 10 billion yen.

SOFTBANK Mobile says that the profitability and competitiveness improvement of the mobile business is urgent business. If this offer is completed, Gungho becomes the member of the SOFTBANK group.

By the way, Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son and Gungho chairperson Taizo Son are brothers.

Softbank's Press Release is here(English).

Japanese 80-year-old composer uses Hatsune Miku

Masao Saiki is an 80-year-old composer reaching the debut 50th anniversary in this year.

He is a very famous man in the Japanese music industry, but he posts a works using vocaloid Hatsune Miku to video sharing site Nico Nico Douga from last year. Of course himself does ALL WORK. His nickname in Nico Nico Douga is "Masa-P"(P is a meaning of the producers. Most of Hatsume Miku composers add P to a nickname).





His works are slightly nostalgic. and styles of the old Japanese popular song.  However, the evaluation in Nico Nico Douga and Twitter is excellent.

GREE carries out promotion with Internet cafe

GREE started new promotion "GREE for Netcafe" with Internet cafes in Japan.

Main services of the Japanese Internet cafe are PC rental, comics rental and online game offers. The online game offer grows up from 2006 through 2012, and the offer time is postponed in particular till 3,500,000 hours from 500,000 hours. GREE paid its attention to this. "GREE for Netcafe" is the service that points are provided depending on the time when we stay in Internet cafes. We can change the points for the virtual goods of GREE's
social games. The the first title is a "Kin-Niku-Man: muscle collection".

GREE chooses social games having Internet cafes and affinity and does promotion. Well, they are the social games of comics source.