Wednesday, September 28, 2005
Tokyo Game Show 2005
Here some highlights of this year's Tokyo Game Show 2005 (TGS2005):
SONY vs Microsoft. At last year's TGS2004 Microsoft's XBOX exhibit was pretty low-key in a secondary hall. This year Microsoft moved with a much bigger exhibit up into the prime position of the main hall right next to (current) market leader SONY Computer Entertainment (SCE)... While in 2004 and before, SCE was the uncontested leader of the market, Microsoft is not accelerating efforts with XBOX-360. While SONY's PSP is fantastic, it's being outsold in Japan by Nintendo's DS...
XBox as a broadband home entertainment machine:
wLAN hotspot for PSP (SONY PlayStation Portable) for game sharing and
download. However, with a little bit of software, PSPs could be used to hold VOIP telephone
calls via these (or other) wLAN hotspots:
Japan's game industry consolidates - this year is the first appearance of merged BandaiNamco,
which used to be separate companies until recently:
The following figure summarizes some of the recent mergers in Japan's game software industry:
SONY staff greeting customers at the end of the first day of the show
(while greeting customers there were facing Microsoft's impressive Xbox360 exhibition area...):
For a summary of Japan's game industry see our Japan Game Industry report.
SONY vs Microsoft. At last year's TGS2004 Microsoft's XBOX exhibit was pretty low-key in a secondary hall. This year Microsoft moved with a much bigger exhibit up into the prime position of the main hall right next to (current) market leader SONY Computer Entertainment (SCE)... While in 2004 and before, SCE was the uncontested leader of the market, Microsoft is not accelerating efforts with XBOX-360. While SONY's PSP is fantastic, it's being outsold in Japan by Nintendo's DS...
XBox as a broadband home entertainment machine:
wLAN hotspot for PSP (SONY PlayStation Portable) for game sharing and
download. However, with a little bit of software, PSPs could be used to hold VOIP telephone
calls via these (or other) wLAN hotspots:
Japan's game industry consolidates - this year is the first appearance of merged BandaiNamco,
which used to be separate companies until recently:
The following figure summarizes some of the recent mergers in Japan's game software industry:
SONY staff greeting customers at the end of the first day of the show
(while greeting customers there were facing Microsoft's impressive Xbox360 exhibition area...):
For a summary of Japan's game industry see our Japan Game Industry report.
US$ 0.5 Billion/year m-commerce on a single train line?!
We worked out that about US$ 0.5 Billion/year worth of train tickets for the Tokyo-Osaka Shinkansen train line are sold by mobile phone. Not a bad m-commerce record for a single train line. For details see our Mobile Payment report. The picture shows a Shinkansen train preparing to stop for 2-3 minutes in Nagoya on the way to Osaka:
Monday, September 05, 2005
Game software industry consolidation
Japan's mobile game software companies are global superpowers. They are all historically grown and linked to other industry sectors, such as characters, arcade games, pachinko (pinball parlor) machines etc.
While the market for traditional home video gamesoftware is rapidly shrinking, a landslide shift is underway to network games, online games and mobile games.
These changes bring consolidation. Some recent mergers are:
Bandai acquires Namco
SEGA (game arcades) and Sammy (pachinko) merge
Takara and TOMY merge
Role playing game leader Square-Enix (itself a merger of Square and Enix) acquires the larger TAITO
The Square-Enix deal is particularly interesting because it underlines the Japanese preference for role playing games.
While the market for traditional home video gamesoftware is rapidly shrinking, a landslide shift is underway to network games, online games and mobile games.
These changes bring consolidation. Some recent mergers are:
Bandai acquires Namco
SEGA (game arcades) and Sammy (pachinko) merge
Takara and TOMY merge
Role playing game leader Square-Enix (itself a merger of Square and Enix) acquires the larger TAITO
The Square-Enix deal is particularly interesting because it underlines the Japanese preference for role playing games.
