Features of China's #1 Gaming Market
At the end of July, Unity technical evangelist Oleg Pridyuk at habrahabr.ru He opened a series of publications about the mobile games market in China. With Oleg’s permission, we publish his materials on App2Top.
China is incredibly similar to Russia — we came to the conclusion with Allen Fu, head of Unity Technologies in China, after a long conversation.
During the 18 months of Unity’s Chinese office, Allen met with the same cultural, historical, and national peculiarities of doing business that the Unity team meets in Russia.
“Russia in the heart of the Chinese is part of their own history. I think our countries should communicate a lot more,” reflects Xin Zhang, who is responsible for technical support for Unity users in China. In addition, he was very surprised when he found out that Unity has not yet opened an office in Russia and does not provide technical support to users in Russian…
Be that as it may, the gaming markets of Russia and China are very different from each other.
“A new amazing world that does not fit with my Western way of thinking,” I thought to myself over and over again, considering popular games in China, discussing local trends, hobbies of young people, modern and classic heroes.
“No, no, no, the Chinese are not interested in this,” I received an answer, showing popular Western games on iOS and Android.
CSR Racing? The Chinese are not interested in expensive cars. And in general, no one needs racing.
The Room? There’s a lot to think about, besides, you’re riding the subway and you’re shaking, so all games with an accelerometer are bad.
Ancient heroes, cultural values of Europe, Western fashion trends, TV shows? It won’t do!
Hidden object? Also not at the checkout! Chinese HOB-s are when non—intersecting objects are scattered against a background with a uniform fill, and there is an indication like “it can fly”, the user’s task is to guess that it is a ghost or an airplane…
What can they like?
JoyFish! The meaning of the game is to kill as many fish as possible, for this you need to buy the best weapons for real yuan. She reminded me of Curiosity from Moulinier…
Although, of course, the whole market is to creation CocoaChina is not reduced.
During the five days that I spent together with our publishing direction in Shanghai, I formed approximately the following image of a successful game in China:
- Runner
- Puzzle
- Fighting game
- Card Collectible game
- Arcade platformer
- Tower defense/tower defense
- Simple mechanics with minimal entry barrier
- About cute animals
- About Chinese culture
- A free game with very brutal monetization
- High contrast, bright colors, minimum details
- Should look good at 800×480 with 65K colors
Unity Games China works directly with local content providers (there is no Google Play here) — hence the knowledge and understanding of the market. We give the apk with the game (in China they only believe in Android) to a partner (a telecom operator or a platform holder), and he returns the wishes for localization and adaptation of the game.
To be continued.
