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Now with 200M game downloads, Line Corporation adds MapleStory title

Rick Martin 2013.09.12

Line Corporation made some headlines earlier today when it announced that its games lineup had surpassed 200 million downloads [1]. There are more than 230 million registered users for its Line chat platform, and many of them are spending time with the company’s many casual game titles to date. What’s most interesting to me about Line’s gaming success so far is that it has all been with relatively unremarkable IP. Its biggest game to date in terms of downloads has been Line Pop with over 32 million, followed by Line Bubble with 25 million. But I’m expecting even bigger figures when Sonic Dash comes to Line this fall. Nexon’s Maple Story celebrated its tenth anniversary this year In addition to announcing its lofty downloads milestone, the company also rolled out Line MapleStory Village today. This is a farm/town-building game from the successful Maple Story franchise by Nexon, which celebrated its tenth anniversary this year. Line MapleStory Village is currently available in Japanese, English, and traditional Chinese, and is available worldwide with the exceptions of China and South Korea. This game should fare well around the Asia region even without those big markets [2]. If you’d like to give it a…

Line Corporation made some headlines earlier today when it announced that its games lineup had surpassed 200 million downloads [1]. There are more than 230 million registered users for its Line chat platform, and many of them are spending time with the company’s many casual game titles to date.

What’s most interesting to me about Line’s gaming success so far is that it has all been with relatively unremarkable IP. Its biggest game to date in terms of downloads has been Line Pop with over 32 million, followed by Line Bubble with 25 million. But I’m expecting even bigger figures when Sonic Dash comes to Line this fall.

Nexon’s Maple Story celebrated its tenth anniversary this year

In addition to announcing its lofty downloads milestone, the company also rolled out Line MapleStory Village today. This is a farm/town-building game from the successful Maple Story franchise by Nexon, which celebrated its tenth anniversary this year.

Line MapleStory Village is currently available in Japanese, English, and traditional Chinese, and is available worldwide with the exceptions of China and South Korea. This game should fare well around the Asia region even without those big markets [2].

If you’d like to give it a try, you can get it now as a free download for iOS and Android. Check out the trailer below for a preview.

For more information on the growth of Line and its vast repertoire of games, please check out our interactive Line Timeline which chronicles its growth from its launch back in 2011.

The milestone was reached on September 6th, according to the company. ↩
And even though it is a stupid farm/town-building game… ↩

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Japanese startup Fello raises $1M to help game developers improve user retention

Takeshi Hirano 2013.09.12

See the original story in Japanese. Singapore-based Unicon, the Japanese startup behind user retention improvement platform Fello, announced today that it has raised 100 million yen (approximately $1 million) from Jafco and other Japanese investors. With these funds, the startup will intensify engineering and marketing efforts and is planning to set up an office in Japan. The platform provides testing and analysis features for typical mobile gaming app functions such as push notification or messaging via an SDK. According to the startup’s CEO Ryuichi Tanaka, more than 100 app developers have signed up for the service since its launch back in August. Over 100 app developers have signed up for Fello since its launch in August In the Japanese gaming industry, many publishers are shifting their development efforts from browser-based apps to native apps. Fello’s growth indicates there’s a high need for this kind of platforms in terms of helping developers improve their apps. Why are they off to such a good start? Tanaka says that it’s likely because the service is free. For developers, if you have published a number of apps, a plan that charges by volume would be a heavy burden. Users can gain a 7-day user…

See the original story in Japanese.

Singapore-based Unicon, the Japanese startup behind user retention improvement platform Fello, announced today that it has raised 100 million yen (approximately $1 million) from Jafco and other Japanese investors. With these funds, the startup will intensify engineering and marketing efforts and is planning to set up an office in Japan.

The platform provides testing and analysis features for typical mobile gaming app functions such as push notification or messaging via an SDK. According to the startup’s CEO Ryuichi Tanaka, more than 100 app developers have signed up for the service since its launch back in August.

Over 100 app developers have signed up for Fello since its launch in August

In the Japanese gaming industry, many publishers are shifting their development efforts from browser-based apps to native apps. Fello’s growth indicates there’s a high need for this kind of platforms in terms of helping developers improve their apps.

Why are they off to such a good start? Tanaka says that it’s likely because the service is free. For developers, if you have published a number of apps, a plan that charges by volume would be a heavy burden. Users can gain a 7-day user retention rate of up to 60% on average by adding a messaging function using the platform’s SDK. That rate is three times higher than the average without such a function.

So how will the startup monetize this platform? I presumed it would adopt a freemium business model — but I was wrong. Tanaka tells me that they will launch an ad network in the beginning of September, but he could not go into more details.

The startup is targeting casual game developers, and that may be why they are based in Singapore, likely hoping fill the need for this kind of solutions for the entire Asian region. They have already started talks with major game developers that may potentially participate in the ad network. We will update you with more details when they become available.

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Japanese romantic simulation chat app adds more characters, hits 1M downloads

Rick Martin 2013.09.12

A few weeks back we told you about an unusual chat app from Japan called Henshin Kudasai. Roughly translated as ‘Please text me back’, the interesting thing about this application is that it doesn’t actually require any second person for you to engage in a flirty chat. It’s a romantic texting simulation game. When we last checked in, the app had 500,000 downloads just after its launch. And now, according to the folks at over at Growing App Henshin Kudasai has surpassed a million downloads since then. Last week, there were six new virtual characters added for users to chat with, bringing the total to 32. That seems to have given the game a boost because in the past week the game has been gaining momentum, becoming the top simulation game in the iOS app store, and breaking into the top 20 free apps overall (see chart below). For Android, it has also fared pretty well, peaking at the third position among all free apps on Google Play in Japan back on August 26th. The game was created by Japanese internet company Basic, and if you’d like to give it a try, it’s available as a free download on iOS…

A few weeks back we told you about an unusual chat app from Japan called Henshin Kudasai. Roughly translated as ‘Please text me back’, the interesting thing about this application is that it doesn’t actually require any second person for you to engage in a flirty chat. It’s a romantic texting simulation game.

When we last checked in, the app had 500,000 downloads just after its launch. And now, according to the folks at over at Growing App Henshin Kudasai has surpassed a million downloads since then.

Last week, there were six new virtual characters added for users to chat with, bringing the total to 32. That seems to have given the game a boost because in the past week the game has been gaining momentum, becoming the top simulation game in the iOS app store, and breaking into the top 20 free apps overall (see chart below).

For Android, it has also fared pretty well, peaking at the third position among all free apps on Google Play in Japan back on August 26th.

The game was created by Japanese internet company Basic, and if you’d like to give it a try, it’s available as a free download on iOS and Android.

henshin-kudasai-app-annie — Henshin Kudasai rankings on iOS, via App Annie

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Learning platform iKnow helps Japanese people study up for Ad-tech Tokyo

Yukari Mitsuhashi 2013.09.12

We recently wrote about a new education app called Chojimaku which uses subtitled movies to teach English. Another well-established learning platform from Japan is iKnow, which has 1.2 million registered users. It was recently announced that the service has added new content to its platform, a very specific course that lets attendees prepare for Ad:tech Tokyo, taking place next week. Studying English is one of the top priorities for many Japanese people, especially working professionals. The new content is titled ‘Mastering English for the marketing and advertisement industry in a week’. By making the reason for learning very clear, it motivates learners and to better prepare for a specific event or occasion. You need to sign up for the service to use the content, but it is provided for free. There are over 100 marketing-related words available to learn, and lessons to enhance your listening ability for this topic. Studying English is one of the top priorities for many Japanese people, especially working professionals. So it is only natural that in the Japanese market, there have always been services in this field, including Rarejob which recently got funded. What differentiates iKnow from other services is that its courses are based…

We recently wrote about a new education app called Chojimaku which uses subtitled movies to teach English. Another well-established learning platform from Japan is iKnow, which has 1.2 million registered users. It was recently announced that the service has added new content to its platform, a very specific course that lets attendees prepare for Ad:tech Tokyo, taking place next week.

Studying English is one of the top priorities for many Japanese people, especially working professionals.

The new content is titled ‘Mastering English for the marketing and advertisement industry in a week’. By making the reason for learning very clear, it motivates learners and to better prepare for a specific event or occasion. You need to sign up for the service to use the content, but it is provided for free.

There are over 100 marketing-related words available to learn, and lessons to enhance your listening ability for this topic.

Studying English is one of the top priorities for many Japanese people, especially working professionals. So it is only natural that in the Japanese market, there have always been services in this field, including Rarejob which recently got funded. What differentiates iKnow from other services is that its courses are based on a spaced-repetition system with a strong focus on obtaining more vocabulary.

The company behind iKnow is Cerego, founded way back in the year 2000. The company provides online language learning services to consumers as well as enterprises inside and outside of Japan. There are over 100 companies that have deployed the learning platform, including Softbank group with its 20,000+ employees.

To see how iKnow works, you can check out the video below.

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Brave Frontier: Alim’s first mobile game is a strong debut [Video]

Rick Martin 2013.09.11

Back in July we reported about a new Japanese mobile gaming studio called Alim, which was jointly established by Fuji Startup Ventures, Gumi Ventures, and B Dash Ventures. Its first mobile game, Brave Frontier, was generally well when it launched, even briefly becoming Japan’s top overall app back on August 8th [1]. Brave Frontier is a sort of card battle RPG, very reminiscent of Puzzle & Dragons in some ways, but without the puzzles. Like most games in this genre you have a party of characters that you can evolve and enhance, and you can also add one friend character to your team each time you venture into battle. Characters correspond to elements/colors, with some more effective against enemies in a rock/paper/scissors fashion (like Puzzle & Dragons and others). I was curious to see that my colleague Junya Mori was into the game, and I had him give me a quick demo of the game (see video below). He points out that the story is not especially great and the loading times can be slow, but that the graphics are really fun at times and gameplay is solid – certainly a great first effort for the folks at Alim. Brave…

Back in July we reported about a new Japanese mobile gaming studio called Alim, which was jointly established by Fuji Startup Ventures, Gumi Ventures, and B Dash Ventures. Its first mobile game, Brave Frontier, was generally well when it launched, even briefly becoming Japan’s top overall app back on August 8th [1].

Brave Frontier is a sort of card battle RPG, very reminiscent of Puzzle & Dragons in some ways, but without the puzzles. Like most games in this genre you have a party of characters that you can evolve and enhance, and you can also add one friend character to your team each time you venture into battle. Characters correspond to elements/colors, with some more effective against enemies in a rock/paper/scissors fashion (like Puzzle & Dragons and others).

I was curious to see that my colleague Junya Mori was into the game, and I had him give me a quick demo of the game (see video below). He points out that the story is not especially great and the loading times can be slow, but that the graphics are really fun at times and gameplay is solid – certainly a great first effort for the folks at Alim.

Brave Frontier is still only available in Japanese, but I hope that one day they expand language support to cover other markets abroad. These Japanese mobile RPG titles are pretty cool, and I hope western markets warm up to as they gradually move beyond the domestic market.

There’s so much cross-over and cross-pollination in this card battle and RPG genres these days in Japan, and sometimes it makes games a little boring — but on the other hand, it means that developers are standing on each others shoulders and building on what seems to work in the industry. And that’s good to see.

The game launched at the same time that the new studio was announced. Note that it’s only available in the Japanese market. ↩

Japan e-commerce startup Monoco partners with major broadcaster Fuji TV

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