Path of Exile continues charting its path to China

The path for Grinding Gear Games’ future runs through China.

Earlier this year, the makers of Path of Exile announced a partnership with Tencent, the largest game company in the world, to bring the online action-role-playing game to China. Grinding Gear’s game is 19th worldwide on the free-to-play massively multiplayer online market, says research firm SuperData, and the studio says it has 14.2 million players. Diablo has long had a following in China, and since Path of Exile is the successor to the spirit of Diablo 2, Grinding Gear sees an opportunity in this growing market — especially since RPGs generated $5.5 billion there in 2015, or 44 percent of the $12.5 billion Chinese PC MMO market, research firm Newzoo told GamesBeat.

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And the studio is hoping that when it goes to China, it can replicate its recent success in Brazil. Path of Exile launched in South America’s biggest game market in December, and general manager and founder Chris Wilson told GamesBeat that Path of Exile doubled its player base with an official, localized version, and it’s hiring people to “do better marketing in the region.”

The lessons from Brazil are also helping Grinding Gear prep for China.

“We’re going to do pretty well, I think,” studio technical director and cofounder Jonathan Rogers said. “We did a closed alpha recently. The metrics were very good. [Tencent] said they’d never seen hours of playtime be that high for a closed alpha. Obviously it’s just wiped at the end of the test, so they were extremely surprised at the level of engagement there. The estimates we’re getting are very good. We think that it could rival all of our other regions.”

‘Only Nixon could go to China’

In gaming, this old Vulcan proverb translates into “you need a local partner.” Tencent is an ideal teammate in this regard, as the Grinding Gears gang is learning all sorts of things about localizing for the Chinese market. Like dealing with skeletons, a common enemy type in Path of Exile.

“A lot of changes are going to have to happen for the Chinese version. At the very least there’s all the changes we need to make for censorship reasons, skeletons and that kind of stuff,” Rogers said. In China, you can’t have skeletons and other dead things in your games unless they are cute, like in Plants vs. Zombies. “This hasn’t been just a content problem for us, but with our tooling as well. How do we make these two different versions without creating a nightmare to maintain?”

Rogers turns back to the skeletons and how the studio could use a technological solution to address it.

“We’ve started to add technology for doing that stuff to our toolset. The other thing we’re trying to do, when we’re making new content — let’s say we want to make a monster — if we have a skeleton, we need to make a new monster that has similar characteristics in terms of speed and attacks and stuff like that. But it has to look completely different. The thing is, when we’re making a monster like that, we don’t want to waste that work. We may as well have it so it can work for the American market as well. For every market,” Rogers said. “That means we’re taking the opportunity to make a lot of new monsters that can make their way into the Western game as well. Especially in the map system [see here for Path of Exile’s latest expansion], where we can add as many different new types of monsters as we like.”

Grinding Gear said it could take up to eight months to get approval from Chinese censors. Path of Exile isn’t particularly political game, though Wilson points out one thing that may need to change beyond ghouls and ghosts.

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“For example, in Path of Exile, one of the characters is lesbian. We don’t make a big deal about this, but it’s there. It’s mentioned in various bits in passing, this subtlety. This is something that wouldn’t be allowed if it was completely visible,” Wilson said. “We haven’t been asked to change it yet, because maybe it’s not noticeable yet.

“Maybe they haven’t seen it yet.”

One of the keys to having a partner such as Tencent in China is getting a company that gets the market. The approach is different there, such as the increased use of billboards and other public spaces for advertising to how you livestream your game for an audience increasingly watching on smartphones, not PCs.

“The nice thing about working with Tencent is they have all the infrastructure for that stuff. That’s their thing,” Rogers said. “It’s funny, with Tencent being such a giant company — the best marketing we can do is actually to the higher-ups at Tencent, to make them interested in marketing our game. That’s our goal. We need to make sure that they’re seeing our game, so they’re interested in spending more money on it.”

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Wilson even has a story to show how Tencent markets its games to its own workers.

“One funny story. When we launched the alpha, we sent one of our server admins over to China so he could be hands-on to make sure things went well. He’s in the Tencent building. Everything’s in Chinese. He doesn’t really understand anything, and he needs to go to the bathroom,” Wilson said. “So he goes to the bathroom and in there is a giant Path of Exile ad, advertising the alpha to Tencent employees.”

Competitive spirit

Path of Exile is well suited for the Chinese market thanks to its competitive side. It has leaderboards and player-vs.-player combat, and as we discussed onstage at GamesBeat 2016, these are both important to players in China.

“We have a lot of PvP systems in Path of Exile that have relatively low engagement levels. Some people play PvP. But it’s sitting there, waiting for China to love it,” Wilson said. “There’s tournaments. There’s so much stuff we added with little fanfare. Players don’t really use it. It’s all sitting there, but we don’t talk about it much because it wasn’t so popular in the West. All it needs is the right audience.”

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And in the closed alpha, Grinding Gear did indeed see China was ready to love the PvP.

“They definitely did. They definitely have all the same drives in terms of doing the ladders and things like that,” Rogers said.

And just like with the skeletons, even this has to change for China. Its gamers like to show off by spending money, another thing we learned during our GamesBeat panel. Grinding Gear learned this, too.

“One of the interesting things we noted was that the economy and metagame were very different. Our game is known for not having gold in it,” Rogers said. Path of Exile is free-to-play, but the New Zealand company traffics in what it calls “ethical” in-game transactions, selling cosmetic upgrades to items and other things that don’t impact the gameplay.

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“Because that alpha happened when we had prophecy being a new league, it meant that there was actually gold in the game for the first time, for these Chinese users. They standardized using gold coins as their trading currency, even though the game doesn’t normally have that. It was a weird situation,” Rogers said. “The economy evolved completely differently.”

Economic diplomacy

And this means Path of Exile’s approach to in-game transactions will need to evolve, too, in China.

“The business model will change to some degree in China. There are lots of discussions about this. We still want to make sure we’re not compromising too much. But yes, there will be things we would not put in the Western game,” Rogers said. “Things that — there are a lot of things we would consider pay-to-win that the Chinese market does not. They don’t see, oh, this item gives you 5 percent more experience, as pay to win. To me that’s crazy, but in China that’s accepted. There will be things that work differently there.”

And this leaves Rogers and Wilson with some mixed feelings.

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“I’m not hugely keen on it. But at the same time, that’s the reality of the Chinese market to some extent,” Rogers said. “It’s not going to affect the players in the Western market at all. That’s very important to us.”

And the duo thinks Tencent is the right partner to help make it happen.

“Tencent are very respectful of the game’s goals,” Wilson said. “They say, ‘This is how we would do it ourselves,’ but we’re not going to do that in this case. What’s a compromise that retains as much of the game’s identity as possible?” Wilson said. “And then we work stuff out.”

Disclaimer: Grinding Gear Games’ Chris Wilson is not related to the writer despite sharing the same last name.