Taking your mobile game to China is tough, but it might just be worth the effort.
Mobile gaming in China was worth $4.4 billion in 2014 — a significant part of an $18.5 billion gaming market — and it’s unsurprising that Western developers want a piece of the action. But taking your game to China isn’t an easy task. Effective localization means more than just translating some text, and developers and publishers also have to deal with an incredibly fragmented Android marketplace, which is split across more than 200 different stores.
Walking around Casual Connect Europe earlier this month, I was intrigued by the growing number of stands devoted to publishing in China and the rest of Asia. Speaking to some of these companies revealed a Chinese market brimming with potential but needing a wildly different approach to find success.
Above: China is the world’s fastest growing economy, with a gaming industry worth $18.5 billion in 2014.
First-time gamers
It seems somewhat contrived to discuss an entire nation of gamers as one, but China’s recent history is unique compared to other major markets.
The Chinese government’s thirteen-year ban on foreign consoles just recently ended, and buying a personal computer is still prohibitively expensive for many Chinese families. There is a massive PC gaming market in China that centers mainly around gaming cafes, but for a lot of people, their first ever experience of gaming is on their smartphones.
“In China, a lot of people — their first electronic hardware is their mobile phone,” said Johnny Lo, account executive at Japanese Internet advertising company Septini. “They can’t afford a console, and they may not have been able to afford a TV back in the old days. PC was too expensive for them. So now the country is more developed — people are making more money — [and] the smartphone is their first gaming item.”
This new exposure to gaming, coupled with relatively short commutes to work in urban areas, results in gamers that play in a very different way to the West. And translating your game to that market is about more than just language.
“Localization is key,” said Lo. “Not just text localization but the culture. The graphics, the whole game scheme has to be adjusted.”
Omri Halamish of Ironsource told me a similar story. The digital distribution company — which raised $85 million in a recent funding round — opened a Beijing office six months ago. While Ironsource’s business there is more about helping Chinese developers succeed in the West, Halamish helped explain the importance of smart localization for the Chinese market.
“Most people think when I tell them they need to localize their game: ‘OK, I need to translate it.’ Not at all,” he said.
“You need to rewrite the story sometimes. You need to change the game flow [to] shorter sessions. Also, in-app purchases and monetization [need to be] much more aggressive and noisy. You have so much noise that you need to get over there.”
Halamish shared an interesting analogy for badly localized Western games: “I heard someone say it’s like watching a Bruce Lee film with subtitles that are very bad,” he said. “This is how your game is going to play.”
“That’s kind of the challenge. What Western game developers need to understand is that they need to rewire their game if they go to China. That’s the bottom line.”
A fragmented marketplace
Even if you have a game that suits the Chinese market, getting it published is tricky. Less so on iOS — where Apple controls most of the distribution for its phones and tablets — but with no single, unified store for the more dominant Android devices (accounting for 78.5 percent of the smartphone market), it’s a minefield, and you’ll likely need some help.
SkyMobi is one company helping Western developers publish in the Chinese market. It’s already got six games on the Chinese Android marketplaces — including Pele: King of Football and Beach Buggy Racing — and has another two currently undergoing localization.
It’s only taking around two games each month because localization isn’t easy, and it wants to hand-pick games it believes can actually succeed.
“To publish in China you need to work with tens if not hundreds of different channels,” explained William Heathershaw, the head of international marketing at SkyMobi. “At the end of the day a publisher only has so many resources, so we’re going to focus on the top maybe 50 channels, which will really give you access to 95-plus percent of the market.”
And each of those channels needs a unique copy of the game. “It’s not as simple as it is in the West,” said Heathershaw. “You have to create a clone copy of your game for each of the different app stores. Some of the larger app stores might [also] have certain requirements that you have to tweak for the game. It does require a lot of time on the publishing side for that to happen.”
Above: SkyMobi’s Pele: King of Football
SkyMobi takes the source code directly from the developer and handles everything from there, including sending payments.
“As we’re a NASDAQ-listed company, we have the ability to give our developers money more quickly than other local Chinese publishers are,” said Heathershaw. “Some developers [elsewhere] have to wait maybe three months to collect what they made.”
But is it worth the effort?
“We’ve had a nice success with Beach Buggy Racing,” said Heathershaw. “In the first month, it’s done a few million downloads in just one market — China. It’s pretty impressive to think that a game can have a decent percentage of its overall downloads from one market.”
In the West, developers give 30 percent of their revenue to the platform holders — Apple and Google. In China, things are a lot more complicated. Payments are generally handled by a third party, as people don’t tend to have credit cards.
So you end up in a situation where you’re giving 30 percent to the platform holder and 30 percent to the payment provider. That leaves 40 percent of your total revenue, which you then need to split with your publisher.
“It always comes down to, ‘Do you want access to the Chinese market or not?’” said Heathershaw. “If you do, that’s just how it goes.”
The mobile spend
Chinese gamers spend money. A recent Niko Partners study revealed that 38 percent of them will spend on mobile games. That’s a surprisingly high number given the relatively low wages compared to the West, but mobile gaming is actually a great, affordable source of entertainment in China.
“There are not many forms of entertainment available, especially to those who live in fourth-tier cities that make maybe, let’s say, $300 a month,” said Heathershaw.
Movie tickets can cost as much as $25 in Beijing, and Chinese bars are pricey compared to salaries. “Instead you have a mobile game where the in-app purchase could be 30 cents or a few dollars,” said Heathershaw. “It’s one of the cheaper forms of entertainment a Chinese person can find.”
Above: The top grossing chart on iTunes looks very different in China. For a start, Clash of Clans isn’t No. 1.
China has the fastest-growing economy in the world, and smartphone use is growing rapidly — smartphone penetration is currently around 47 percent — but it’s not a great source of advertising revenue.
“The value of your traffic is not as valuable as it might be in the West, so advertisers are not willing to spend as much money on traffic in China as they are overseas,” said Heathershaw.
“You have to make up your revenue elsewhere, and luckily Chinese people are willing to spend money in games.”
The popular messaging service WeChat — with over 438 million users — is a big factor in this willingness to spend, according to Junde Yu, the Asia-Pacific vice president at mobile analytics firm App Annie.
“They first pushed casual games and people started playing … even though they are not gamers,” Yu told The Next Web. “And we’re talking about masses here. Because WeChat games are so easy to play and so easy to pick up, after a while they get hooked on [them] and start to pay.
“All these people have never paid for mobile content before, but once they make the first payment, that’s it. After the first payment, they start to pay a lot more. WeChat brings them through the floodgate, opens the floodgate for them: Make the first payment, and after that, you’re likely to pay more.”
Local connections
Ironsource’s Beijing office is staffed entirely by Chinese nationals. It’s no accident.
“When we opened the office, we went through a lot of thinking [of] how to do it,” said Omri Halamish. “At the end of the day, if you want to make it in China, you need to do it with local people. It’s hard, but that’s the only way to crack China.”
Publishing a game follows the same rule — if you want to really succeed, you need a local partner.
“Once you develop the right game with the right partners, there is money to be made,” said Halamish.
William Heathershaw points to big examples of Western games that found success in China. “If you look at successful examples like Subway Surfers, the Angry Birds franchise, and Fruit Ninja, they all have local partners.”
The problem is finding those local partners that are willing to take on your game and invest the time in localizing, publishing, and promoting it properly.
Above: Mobile games on display at the ChinaJoy 2014 event.
“We aim to sign around two games per month,” said Heathershaw, “so not every developer that wants to go to China [with us] can go to China. That’s the real issue.”
Heathershaw curates SkyMobi’s growing collection of Chinese offerings, but he has to be sure the games he chooses have a high chance of success. “I love to talk to developers,” he said. “A lot of them have passionate love for their game. Unfortunately it’s not always the right fit for this market.”
But he insists that it’s a market every company should be interested in: “It would make sense that every company has an interest in the Chinese market. It’s just the approach and how can they do it.”
Accidental success
Just because a game isn’t designed with the Chinese audience in mind, that doesn’t mean it can’t find success there. There is the odd, encouraging story of accidental success.
I met Antonio Alberto Santiago, an Australian designer, animator, and developer, at Casual Connect. His asynchronous multiplayer iOS game, Goat Punks, found accidental success in China, without any localization or translation.
Goat Punks is a free game with in-app purchases — you can buy cosmetic items and weapons for your goat with real money — and Santiago told me most of his sales come from China. Unfortunately he can’t understand any of the reviews the Chinese players are leaving, as “they’re all in Chinese — I don’t know what they’re saying.”
Above: Goat Punks creator
While Goats Punks only has around 20,000 active players and isn’t generating a huge amount of income, it’s interesting to see the small success you can have in the Chinese market with zero marketing and localization.
So what’s the key to Goat Punks’ unexpected popularity? “A Chinese girl was saying because it’s cute and stuff,” said the laid-back Santiago. “The style.”
Santiago’s started making 3D-printed goats inspired by the game and putting them in little clear plastic boxes that he found in a local store. It’s a neat throw-back to his design background, and I couldn’t help thinking that his Goat Punks brand could go huge in China if he wanted the success a little more.
“It’s all just a test for me,” he said nonchalantly. “I made a game: ‘Oh, that’s cool.’ I made some toys for it: ‘Oh, that’s cool.’ It’s all just an experiment in how far I can push things.”
And that’s exactly what the mobile push into China feels like right now: an experiment in how to find success in this almost alien market. But done right, it’s an experiment that can pay off.