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Gree and Yahoo Japan invest $2.2M in GxYz social-gaming business

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 1 min

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Japan’s mobile-social-gaming network Gree and Yahoo Japan are investing $2.2 million in a joint venture to make social games on smartphones.

The GxYz startup will open on March 15, and it will make social-mobile games on smartphone platforms for the Japanese market. It will benefit from the user acquisition capabilities of Yahoo Japan.

Gree will own a 51 percent share in the business. Several games are expected to be released within the year. While Gree is expanding in the West, it has a multibillion-dollar market value because of its lucrative business as a platform for social-mobile games in the Japanese market. Gree’s archrival in Japan in DeNA, which also has a close relationship with Yahoo Japan.

GxYz will be headed up by Tomoyuki Isaka, the ex-president of Gree Korea.

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Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.