Bad blood in Japan’s mobile social gaming scene: The country’s second biggest company in that area, GREE [JP, Asiajin articles], has filed a lawsuit in the Tokyo District Court today, suing the No. 1 player and main competitor DeNA (Asiajin articles) for copyright infringement (both of these companies are listed and are large-cap by the way).

GREE says a fishing game they developed has been copied by DeNA for their mobile social gaming platform Mobage-town, which has the largest user base among any mobile-only social network in Japan (14.5 million at the end of June 2009 vs. GREE’s 12.6 million at the same time). Specifically, DeNA is accused of having copied elements like the game’s top page or the fish-catching game mechanics.

GREE seeks an injunction and damages, saying DeNA is violating copyright and unfair-competition laws. Japanese media are reporting that both companies have been negotiating over this issue for months now until GREE finally decided to take the rival to court today.

Here’s a video that explains (in English) how Tsuri Star 2, GREE’s wildly popular fishing game, works:

PS
GREE claims they are seeing one million new members each month since May and this is two to three times higher than their competition so the ranks mentioned in this article have to be taken with a grain of salt.

Tags: Japan by Serkan Toto
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Mixi, the biggest social network service in Japan, started their OpenSocial compliant application platform Mixi Appli officially opened to every Mixi user on PC on last month. Mixi Appli Mobile is planned to follow this month.

After couple of months closed beta test, Mixi successfully lined up 130 applications by third parties and affiliated startups, including big names like Yahoo! Japan, Konami, Recruit, etc.

However, a company called Community Factory, start-up got the first OpenSocial app grant by Mixi, which encouraged to create Mixi Appli, released a social game seems to be inspired by Facebook’s successful Friends For Sale!, but with surprisingly sick taste. They named the game as “My Slave-chan”. (“-chan” shows some affinity. “-chan” is a colloquial form of “-san”, which corresponds to English “Mr./Ms.”.)

Even the concept of selling your friends on the Facebook app got some critics. On this slave application, according to their erased instruction, players are supposed to buy their friend on her/his social graph as a slave, with giving another name, get her/his to shout your making line, force to serve as a slave to earn money.

The application rapidly caused condemnation among bloggers in hours after launch, and the app was withdrawn on (the very same Mixi Appli platform launch day) August 25th.

On Mixi Appli, Community Factory also released a game “Chusha Sensou” (“Parking War” in English) which is similar with Parking Wars on Facebook, and a game “Densetsu no Totem Pole” (“legendary totem pole” in English) which has the pretty same concept as the popular Facebook game Tower Bloxx, according to the blogger mixiapp.

via ITmedia News

See Also:

anonymous blog on this issue entry on Hatena Anonymous Blog [J]

Mixi’s Press Release for Mixi Appli platform launch [J]

Tags: Japan, New Service, News by Akky Akimoto
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