Games

Super-launched mobile Clash popular strategy game Clan Wandoujia in Chinese App Store. More than 450 million users have downloaded 1.6 billion applications Wandoujia is one of the largest Android stores in China, a country where Google Play has no real presence. And many of those millions wanted to play Clash of Clans - in the first month of the shop, the game has been downloaded over 200,000 times. But there was one big problem: the game uses Google payment services for in-app purchases, but is a function that Chinese players could not really use it.

It was a huge success that has made absolutely no money.

Super-accident is not an isolated incident. Many Western games developers looking to China and its booming mobile stage as a new untapped market to make successful games. But it is also a market full of pitfalls. There are differences in language and culture, a variety of payment options, and if you release on Android, there are literally hundreds of different application stores; Wandoujia may be among the greatest, but it's far from the only one. And thanks to the high level of piracy, free games to play still dominate more than they do in the West.

Clash of Clans

For this reason, a cottage industry of publishers emerged in recent years, with a focus on mobile games development in the West and adapting to China. Sometimes the process is as simple as changing the payment method in your application, other times all aspects of the game are changing, with new art and added character to appeal to audiences premises. But this is a company that develops and growing rapidly. "The market has evolved to become very, very crowded and competitive," said Henry Fong, CEO of Yodo1.One editor of the most recent examples of this phenomenon Monument Valley. When the game launched on iOS, China has . turned out to be the second largest market, accounting for 12 percent of all sales, but when it came time to put the Android version of the game in China, ustwo developer has decided to seek a partner iDreamsky, the company behind the Chinese versions games like Temple Run and Fruit Ninja. "We wanted to partner with someone who understood the market and the players in it," says executive producer Dan Gray ustwo. "Downloads and acquisitions increased after the launch of the first expansion pack of the game, in November 2014," said CEO Michael Chen iDreamsky in a press release, "demonstrating the enormous appeal of this game, you have a very broad demographic we are sure we can replicate in China. "

It's still early, it is not clear how Monument Valley will be modified to better respond to China - "the details have yet to be implemented," says Gray - but in some cases can be quite drastic changes.

When iDreamsky Temple Run launched in China, for example, introduced new models of characters in the anime style. Turn-based strategy Hero Academy team added a new exclusive fighters for the Chinese version; that local actors would not refer to Tolkien fantasy game world style, new characters were inspired by Chinese mythology instead. History difficult space sim Alpha Zero, meanwhile, had rewritten the entire dialogue, so I felt more natural for a Chinese audience. It contained voices of local actors and dialogue, even recorded in a studio in Beijing; an app store review described as "the best Chinese game ever."

And these small changes can have a big impact. Chinese version of Safari Skiing, published by Yodo1 presented music, art and personalized specifically for the new market; character of the polar bear has been changed to a panda, for example, while a penguin turns into a turtle. The result was more than 25 million downloads in just six months.