How Oasis Games is creating a console beachhead for Chinese game makers

Fans of indie games and unusual new gaming experiences may remember a game — quietly released earlier this year in April 2016—called Koi, a game about the eponymous ornamental carp typically found in Asia. What made this game unique aside from the subject matter is that it was the first game fully developed in mainland China to be published on the PlayStation in North America. With the PlayStation 4 (and PS Vita) having officially launched in China in 2015 —effectively ending the black market for consoles in China—it was only a matter of time before the cross-pollination of Western/Chinese began in earnest.

And that cross-pollination took fruit in October with the launch of PlayStation VR as Koi publisher Oasis Games pushed out four games for Sony’s entry into the virtual reality race.

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GamesBeat sat down with Martho Ghariani, head of PlayStation business development at Oasis Games, to learn more about this company’s strategies and future plans.

GamesBeat: So the company is called Oasis Games, and you’re the business development manager?

Martho Ghariani: Yes, I’m in business development, and we started doing PlayStation games. We basically started doing PlayStation since last year with Koi. So basically the console market was closed up until the end of 2014, meaning the only way you could get a console in China was in an import store or something like that. You could definitely get them, but it was a little bit tough, and there was no marketing from Sony of course, because it was just not allowed. But then the markets opened up, and Sony opened a department in Shanghai, Xbox as well. Now you’ve got Sony organizing all kinds of events, and one of them was working together with this Chinese crowdfunding site, called Modian.

They do a lot of crowdfunding games, and Sony had this contest where they hosted a bunch of games, and you could click on the one you liked the most, and it would be published by Sony in China, which is how we came into contact with our first title, Koi. So they won this contest sponsored by Sony, and we got the rights to publish it everywhere but China, because already Sony published it.

So we basically became the first publisher ever to bring a Chinese game to the West. There are some other games developed by Chinese teams, but they’re usually co-developed, like a game like Warframe, so it’s hard to say where it’s from. But this is the first homegrown game developed in China to be released in the West.

GamesBeat: Where is Oasis Games based?

Ghariani: Beijing. Basically the company started out with browser games, taking a bunch of Chinese browser games, localizing them and releasing them in Latin America, minor countries, and Eastern Europe, then we did mobile gaming as well, and now console gaming for the first time.

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GamesBeat: Are mobile games the core business of Oasis Games?

Ghariani: Actually the core business is browser games. There was a browser game called Legend Online, which was a typical browser game. There’s an English version that another company acquired the English rights to. It’s a very standard sort of browser game where you charge money and stuff, so that’s their main source of revenue. The second game we have going on right now that we’re publishing everywhere is Naruto Online, which is an officially licensed browser game, that we publish through Tencent and Bandai Namco. At this point that’s the main thing, but VR is very promising, consoles are very promising to us as well. So you could say it’s a little bit on the side for now, but we have four titles coming for PSVR.

GamesBeat: What’s interesting is that you’re showing four PSVR games. Are they all going to be released separately? Will they all be released digitally?

Ghariani: Initially digitally. We’re talking with partners who’ll do a physical release. And we’re thinking of releasing a bundle next year, like a China VR pack. We’re still in discussions, but this is what we’re thinking.

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GamesBeat: Are you thinking of doing a direct sales physical release in the limited edition style, like with FanGamer or are you thinking of doing a retail release?

Ghariani: Actual retail. We’re thinking of both ways. What I’m mentioning now is full retail. We’re working with a partner who helps us get the game into stores, basically.

GamesBeat: So we’ll be able to walk into a Best Buy and find your games.

Ghariani: Yeah that’s definitely what we’re going for. There are a bunch of advantages we see to that, but this for us is still unexplored territory. We’re doing digitally now because we’ve done that before, and we want to move into retail at the same time.

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GamesBeat: You’re moving into the U.S. market now. Does this mean you’ve got a North American office?

Ghariani: Not at the moment.

GamesBeat: Everything’s happening out of Beijing?

Ghariani: Yeah, everything’s basically happening out of Beijing.

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GamesBeat: For these four games, are all the developers based in China?

Ghariani: Yeah, they’re all in China. One of the developers is an hour away from our office in Beijing. One of the developers looks like a 50 year-old Kurt Cobain if Kurt Cobain was Chinese. [Laughs]

GamesBeat: Is Oasis funding the development of these games, or are you just facilitating their release by publishing overseas? Because some of them, like Pixel Gear and Ace Banana, look like they’re made by smaller teams, while Weeping Doll and Dying: Reborn look like they required bigger budgets.

Ghariani: We didn’t have to fund these titles, as they already had investors. In terms of development, we do fund in terms of marketing, promotion, doing events like this, etc.

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GamesBeat: OK, so Oasis functions as the publisher. I know you started with Koi on PlayStation, but you seem to be embracing the VR opportunity. Four titles is a pretty big commitment to VR, so why are you making such a push into VR specifically?

Ghariani: After Koi we didn’t want to go another 12 months without having any titles coming out, so we wanted to have something —at least two games— and these games basically just came to us and they happened to be VR. At the same time we’re the only publishing partner of Sony Shanghai; there’s no other publisher doing [bringing Chinese games over to North America]. So we weren’t actively looking VR, but they were available, and although two of them are kind of similar —a rail shooter and a more hardcore shooter—packaged together it’s still pretty nice. That’s why we went for VR.

 

GamesBeat: These seem to be made by small teams. How many people made these games?

Ghariani: Pixel Gear has a bunch of people working on it but the main guy is one person. Ace Banana isn’t a huge team but it’s not small either; it’s about 5-6 people? Dying: Reborn is being made by about 12 people or so? Weeping Doll I’m not sure but I’d deduce it’s a similar size team to Dying.

GamesBeat: What’s Oasis Games’ future strategy? What’s your roadmap going forward?

Ghariani: Although we have this VR initiative right now, it’s not like we’re going into VR only. We just want to have quality games from China. I can’t say anything right now, but there are some titles coming up… OK, so I’ve been a gamer all my life, and I like games in general. You play games from China and some are pretty cool and some are “meh” and some are pretty crappy. Some of the games we’re talking about right now are pretty close to being the first triple-A games from China, huge teams and really awesome games. And these are things we’re really busy with right now; we’ve already secured one game. So we’re working hard to get these games.

GamesBeat: It’s interesting to see these games come from China. Most games we associate with China are free-to-play, browser-based games, and most gamers in the West probably don’t care very much about them. But with the console market opening up in China with PlayStation and Xbox, do you think we’ll see more Chinese developers focusing their efforts on the console market?

Ghariani: Definitely. To be honest I don’t know all the developers super well, but in the case of Koi, I know they’ve been gaming and importing games for a long time. And they’re just waiting to do more stuff. When I talk to [Dotoyou founder and Koi developer, Julien Li], he says Chinese developers are mostly used to games where you use microtransactions to become stronger, and he says we really need to go through the process. There’s an entire generation who has never held a joystick in their hands, they’ve only played games using a mouse or their thumbs. You can’t just go full-blown with these complicated games because the market’s not ready for this. In this sense it’s extremely exciting what’s coming from China, because holy shit some of these people are insanely creative.

Take Koi for example. It started out as a mobile game and it’s not the longest game, but the quality of the music to start with —this was a 3-man development team—now they have a 12 person development team, and they really want to make indie games and console games. Just give them some time and whoa…

GamesBeat: With the Koi team I can imagine some cool things coming out of that studio since they have a history of importing Western or Japanese games, and understand what makes these good games. But I can imagine the transition might be harder for a lot of Chinese developers who have only made browser-based MMOs and stuff in the past.

Ghariani: For the Koi developers their favorite game is Metal Gear Solid. It’s the stuff they grew up on. I remember visiting them for the first time, I didn’t know what to expect. I thought maybe I’d see an aquarium and a chess board [laughs] but I walk in and there’s this huge freaking Solid Snake poster, it was like “whoa!” [laughs]

So yeah, these guys are all-in. And the developer for Pixel Gear, he used to work in Japan at other game developers, and another developer we’re talking to is working on a Resident Evil-style shooter, a first-person shooter. These guys all used to work in Japan at big gaming companies, and now they’re going back to China to get the industry going there, and they’re going to make some insane games and the experiences they like to create.

GamesBeat: It’ll be great to see the first big hit come from China. No one knows any developers from there, but that’ll come around once a really great game comes out of China. That’s what’ll put them on the map.

Ghariani: I say this from a publisher perspective that it’d be awesome, as I’ll continue to have a job [laughs], but apart from that as a gamer I’m really looking forward to that. From the first time I played Koi, it’s a personal favorite of mine. It’s a real favorite of mine; you could just tell there was something else there that was not in any other Chinese game. So if something like this can get funding and stimulation in the press, whether from Sony or elsewhere, then you know a game like Koi has to go places.