Sports mobile social game platform "mobcast" broke through 3M users

In this week, Japanese sports mobile social game platform "mobcast" broke through 3M users.

mobcast is mobile Social Networking Service specialized in the sports that opened in February, 2010. At first, they provided social games of soccer and baseball which developed in themself, and sports news. However, they became the open platform in November, 2012. Now, various sports social games such as baseball, soccer, horse racing and fishing are provided by third parties.

According to them, users suddenly increased this month. Because there were a lot of sporting events in this month such as WBC, the arrival of the Japanese professional baseball season, the soccer J League start. The reality world links with Social Networking Service! :) They renewed it recently to strengthen service as the sports media.

NTT DoCoMo brings a mobile game platform into China

Japanese mobile company NTT DoCoMo brought game platform "d game" into the mobile market of China Mobile Communications Corporation.

d game is a NTT DoCoMo's mobile game platform, and started in Japan in December 13, 2012. Many third parties such as Bandai Namco, KONAMI, SEGA, Square Enix, TAITO, TECMO KOEI provide various mobile social games here. NTT DoCoMo brought this platform into China entirely. D2C China, doing advertisement and marketing business in China is in charge of the localization. In addition, not only the game apps but also the wall paper for mobiles are offered in China. The contents offered at the time of release are 20 kinds, but of course they increase from now on.

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).