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Japan's Gumi hires former Xbox game exec to storm North American mobile game market

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 3 min

Japan’s Gumi is flush with cash thanks to Brave Frontier, a huge mobile gaming hit in Japan. Now the company is expanding into the U.S. market, and it has hired AJ Redmer, a former studio manager at Microsoft’s Xbox division and one of the creators of the Xbox 360 game console, to help with its Stateside push.

Gumi is opening four sizable game studios, including one in Austin, Texas, and it plans to invest even more by the end of the year. It shows how competition has moved to a global stage in the mobile gaming (an estimated $20 billion market in 2014), and the companies that have figured out how to make money in mobile are investing in bigger guns.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. 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.