LINE escalated e-comics business in Taiwan

LINE released e-comics service for mobile LINE Manga in Taiwan. This is the first overseas development of their e-comics service.

LINE Manga is the e-comics service released in April, 2013 that can read various comics and novels with smartphones and tablets. LINE cooperates with more than 100 publishing companies and contributes more than 100,000 books. The application passes 11 million downloading and grows up to the hugest e-book service in Japan.

Japanese contents are very popular in Asia, but yet a lot of bad bootleg circulate because the overseas advance of Japanese companies is poor. LINE performed a capital tie-up with Japanese main publication companies Kodansya(講談社), Shogakukan(小学館), and Media-Do(メディアドゥ) in October 2014, and established joint venture LINE Book Distribution to improve such situation. In the beginning, yhey release Taiwanese version of 1200 e-mangas. Some popular mangas become free every day in rotation. Furthermore, they present special LINE stickers of mangas to users who downloaded that mangas.

Ingress set 281 bookstores as portals

Niantic cooperated with Japanese printing company Dai Nippon Printing(大日本印刷) in geolocation mobile game Ingress and registered Maruzen, Junkudo and Bunkyodo which are group bookstore of them as portal. They have 281 branches in Japan, and all of them become the portal of Ingress.

In commemoration of this, Niantic showed original back story about these portals. It is shown in free(but unfortunately it is written only in Japanese).

Furthermore, these bookstores present a bookmark of Ingress to customers as campaign.
In addition, the Japanese version of the official novel of Ingress "The Niantic Project: Ingress" was released on October 27. Japanese fans of Ingress seem to increase more from now on.

Anime of the popular mobile game Monster Strike passed 5M view in 15days

mixi started the broadcast of the short anime series of their popular mobile game Monster Strike in Youtube from October 1, and it succeeds now.

See Also:
Anime of the popular mobile game Monster Strike is broadcasted in Youtube from October 10

They announced that the world total view number of the anime series of Monster Strike passed 5 million on October 25. Furthermore, fans of the YouTube channel passed 100,000, too. Of course these continue increasing now. They support 11 languages(Japanese, English, Chinese, Korean, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese) in this, and this is rare in Japanese web anime. Interestingly, even fans of the countries where Monster Strike of mobile game ver. is not released watch this. This may be effective as marketing.

Mobile game company Colopl established the subsidiary which produce VR panorama video

Colopl is one of the Japanese main mobile game companies, but has made efforts in VR. They have already released two VR games.

See Also:
Japanese mobile game company Colopl developed a game for Oculus Rift
Japanese mobile game company Colopl released the 2nd VR game "Shironeko VR Project"

And they established subsidiary "360Channel" in charge of the business of the 360-degree VR panorama video at last. This is the first time that Colopl launches the business except the game. Naruatsu Baba, the founder and the CEO of Colopl takes office as CEO of this. The company profiles are these.

Company name: 360Channel
Address: 4-20-3, Ebisu, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo, Japan
Establishment date: November 2, 2015
Capital: 700million yen
CEO: Naruatsu Baba
Business: 360-degree VR panorama video

Level-5 and NHN PlayArt released a mobile game of Yo-Kai Watch

Level-5 released their popular game/anime Yo-Kai Watch in North America from October. They will carry out various campaigns of this for a holiday season.

See Also:
Level-5 and Dentsu establish a joint company and sell Yo-Kai Watch in a global market

Of course they do not forget a Japanese market. They released Yo-Kai Watch's first mobile game "Yo-Kai Watch Puni Puni(妖怪ウォッチぷにぷに)" with NHN PlayArt in the end of October.

Yo-Kai Watch Puni Puni is a joint development mobile game of Level 5 and NHN PlayArt. The beginning, players make friends with Yo-Kai butler Whisper, and battle against Yo-Kais who are in the downtown with puzzle according to his guide. When players win to Yo-Kais, they can make friends with them.

To be frank, Yo-Kai Watch Puni Puni is resemble LINE:Disney TSUM TSUM. Sure thing. These developers are the same:) Mobile game "LINE: Disney TSUM TSUM" which NHN PlayArt developed makes a hit all over the world as well as Japan. It passed 45 million downloading, and the number of the goods sale passed 10 million.

In Yo-Kai Watch Puni Puni, NHN PlayArt added the element of the RPG to a casual puzzle like Disney TSUM TSUM. Furthermore, graphic is 3DCG like the Yo-Kai Watsh series for Nintendo 3DS and rhese are very cute! Now, unfortunately we can play this only in Japan, but it may be released global if Yo-Kai Watch makes a hit abroad.