Successfully Publishing your PC Games in China | Matthew Leopold
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Premium PC Games have been picking up steam in China, but the government is cracking down. Join Matthew Leopold to find out how to successfully navigate the China PC gaming scene not only from a regulations standpoint but also in terms of ‘culturalization’ and distribution.
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Successfully Publishing your PC Games in China | Matthew Leopold
- 1. Successfully Publishing Your PC Games in China: The Good, the Bad, and the Extremely Frustrating… Matthew Leopold Director of BD and Marketing
- 2. Key Distribution Platforms for Premium Games in China Tencent’s WeGame Platform
- 3. 3 13 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 2015 2017 Steam Games Owned by Chinese Players 5.35 17.3 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 2015 2017 China’s Steam Users (M) The Fastest Growing Steam Market in the World 1301% Increase In Total Consumption 223% Growth in Users 333% Growth in Consumption Per User With a total of 300M Gamers in China, the 6% currently on Steam is a drop in the bucket of the total available market!
- 4. Why the sudden change? Introduction of Steam to Chinese players Disposable income Localized Payments
- 5. The Special Sauce • Proper Storefront Translations • Ground-up in-game Content translations • Localized Voiceovers • Pricing • Live-ops and Customer Support • Community Management • Marketing • And…. Government approval
- 6. Two different store fronts based on geo-detect
- 7. Drive recommended reviews and boost your game’s overall rating! Culturalized Store Fronts Chinese players want culturalized content. Simple translations often do not translate to marketable products. Create a voice for your game description that will make an impact on your potential Chinese players.
- 8. Successful games in China require much more than a simple localization. Chinese players want a game that looks and feels Chinese. Games should be cultuarlized to the tastes and preferences of the Chinese Don’t stop at text strings! For Hand of Fate, we also culturalized all voice-overs to Chinese! Ground-up Content Culturalization
- 10. Pricing Strategy Steam currently has a pricing suggestion feature that automatically lowers the price in China to approximately half the price of the US. Pro Tip: For Tencent’s platform they are ‘encouraging’ a price that falls lower than the current advertised price on any platform, thus most likely <50% your US standard price. Base Price: 68RMB~$10 Summer Sale: 17RMB~$2.50 Base Price: $19.00 Summer Sale: $4.99
- 11. Chinese Gaming Media Pitched 40+ PC-specific Chinese gaming media websites!
- 12. Social Media and Chinese Blogs Baidu Tieba
- 14. Front Page Feature RPG Page Feature Recently Updated Feature Steam Features
- 15. 2.65 3.31 5.96 11.26 48.34 United Kingdom Australia Russia United States China Share of Players by Country 5.86 6.25 6.25 31.25 31.25 Russia Canada United Kingdom United States China Share of Players by Country Practice Meets Projections: Increasing Players, Driving Revenue Revenue generated in China increased 1118% after we published it on the China market. China now accounts for 41% of total revenue. After we published Infinity Wars on the China market, the number of Chinese players increased by 1000%.
- 16. What Comes Next?
- 18. Reach More Players on Steam’s Biggest Competitor Cross-Platform Publishing to Reach WeGame’s 30M Daily Active Users
- 19. Obtaining Government Licensing Copyright Registration 1 2 Ministry of Culture 3 SAPPRFT
- 20. While bearing no real political or cultural significance, skeletons are seen as too horrifying for general audiences. We remedied this by converting the skeletons into wood golems… I know... Politically sensitive maps, character designs, faction names, logos, and cut scene videos all needed to be reimagined. Obtaining Government Licensing
- 21. Takeaways • Ground-up localizations are essential for reaching your Chinese audience • Price your game appropriately • On the ground marketing to gain momentum and spread the world • And…. Government approval – an eventual necessity for reaching the largest player audiences in China
Editor's Notes
- You guys may recognize us as mobile publishers, we have helped a number of foreign developers successfully publish their games in China, we also are known on the global publishing side for titles like CR and RS, But today I will be talking about PC publishing, and more specifically, premium PC publishing in China.
- Currently, as it stands, there are two platforms that we are focusing on for publishing premium PC games on in the China market. That is not to say that other platforms may pop up in China in the near future, if the fragmentation of the Android market is any indication, there will be a number of others that will follow suit, but right now, and for this talk, I will be focusing on these two platforms. Today we are going to talk about publishing premium games in China, and what that entails. Two main platforms for Steam publishing at the moment: Steam, and Tencent’s wegame
- Let me first throw some numbers at you…. Rapidly growing market for premium games among Chinese players. Over 200% growth in Steam users in China over the past couple of years, and this is really only a drop in the bucket for the total 300M gamers on PC in China We have also seen a change in Chinese consumer behvaior in terms of the amount of games consumed by Chinese players, increasing from about 3 to 13-14 games per Steam user queue
- 1st. Introduction of Chinese players to Steam through games like DOTA 2 and CS:Go. Perfect World had an agreemnent with the governemtn to publish and promote these two titles on steam in China. 2nd. Integration of key payment systems such as Alipay, Unionpay and Wechat Pay. 3rd. A growing middle class and more disposable income for premium games that they weren’t finding anywhere else. Originally had Alipay but dropped – check If you had told me, premium games in China in the past
- But what does it really take to reach this massive and relatively untapped market? Context is key for proper Chinese localizations Good quality voice overs or none at all. MMOs, MMORPGs, and MOBAs still reign king in the China market Online co-op is important vs. local co-op. PVP elements are key Rogue-likes like The Binding of Isaac and Lost Castle Survival games like H1Z1 and Don’t Starve Sandbox Games like Terraria and Minecraft Open World like GTA and The Witcher Half the price for Chinese versions Sometimes offer early buyer discounts Rounding the price to end in 9, a trick not entirley new to pricing strategies is also seeing more success Weibo, wechat, and Chinese gaming forums Steam’s regional pricing automattically reduces price in China to around 40% of its US counterpart Local Streamers - Youku, Bilibili, Douyu, Zhanqi, PandaTV
- Today I am going to frame the convesation around a title that we have worked on called hand of fate. Defiant Development, based out of Australia. Some of you may know the game Defiant development had been pushing us to get into PC publishing for a few years, but it was only until about a year and a half ago when we started considering seriously jumping into this side of the gaming market. The we work with our partners to add the localized content on steam, geo-detect to determine which version players are pulling down.. Geo-detect Today I will be primarily discussing a game called Hand of Fate
- Really want to create a voice for your game description that will make an impact on your Chinese players.
- Chinese players want a game that looks and feels Chinese. Simple translations will not do the trick. Typically, the ones that our team sees As well as the in-game dialogue and text
- Price suggestion feature Consider when pricing your game you will likely have to go low for China This is really to go for the mass market and volume. And while chinese players are indeed willing to drop money on titles these days, there is still a learning curve and baby steps need tobe taken in order t get them accustomed to this side of consumption.
- Pitched press releases to over 30 sites
- 26k interactions
- Using the correct channels and targeted relevant influencers, we were able to reach a couple Several hundred thousands of influencers. Bili Bili – 25K Live viewers at peak, 30K total views Youku 65k Views Bilibili Recorded video – 65k views
- So you have a properly culturalized product now, covered all your bases on the marketing side. In this next section I am going to discuss more about the government approval process and why it is important.
- - So a couple of months back we started seeing this error message pop up in China for players trying to asccess steam from the Mainland - In an effort diversify risks and ensure that we are targetting all available markets for the largest player base in the world So how else to we reach Chinese players and why is government approval so important?
- Well the answer is partnering with local players such as Tencent’s relatively new gaming platform, WeGame. 30M DAU Wegame currently honly has about 40-50 titles on its platform. Only about a dozen of these titles are from foreign developers and are the games that Tencent is directelty publishing. However, given the government approval process, which I will go into in more depth, in a moment, Tencent has also sought out other partners to help foreign developers get through this process and get more foreign titles onto their platform.
- - ….And to launch on WeGame, you need government licensing. Government licensing is not new to us, we have had to comply since last July. Copyright registration for your game in China- Obtaining Registration Approval with your game with the Ministry of Culture Obtaining Publication Authorization for your game with SAPPRFT (The State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film & Television Copyright registration with NCAC (National Copyright Administration of the PRC) – this is for the channel partners- so that we have the rights to publish the game in China – 30 day process. This part of the process is a reminant of the early 20-teens when there as a surge in piracy, cracked builds, rip offs, and straight up IP infringement by local developers. MoC - 2 parts Description of your game’s content, including any and all details of mehcanics,storyline, background, etc. You will need to provide that Copyright registration from step one. Proof of local business registration Proof of contract if publishing someone elses games As well as some legal documents declaring that the game doesn’t violate any laws/regualtions in China 2nd part involves the distribution partners and your developer partner - End user aggreement from distribution parnter You will need that authorization from yourforeign partner that ssays that you are allowed to publish your game in China As well as various declarations SAPPRT – the latest and most comprehensive addition to the regulatory process. Where you will need the above two, steps as well as a slew of addditional requirements that I will save you guys from at this time. Feel free to check out an article written by our CEO…. And it looks something like this,.
- - But it’s not over yet… sometimes you need a couple of iterations to get it right… - Earthwork Games’ physics-based RTS, “Forts”, pitches the USA, Russia, and China against one another in a battle for oil. Depoliticizing Forts for government review meant implementing fundamental changes to the game’s storyline and art assets.
- And why is government approval so important?