A Glimpse into the Indie Game Market in China

[Music] hello everyone so today I'm gonna do a very short presentation about the game market especially the indie game market in China and I'm Brandi from XD Network so this is my QR code for a wee chat actually so I'm right now in charge of the business development as well as premium game publishing so premium here stands for indie pay to download games so a short introduction of XD right now we are developer publisher also as known as the parent company of tap-tap which is a game platform mobile game platform in China and also we are the parent company of XD Globo right now we are publishing mobile games in Southeast Asia especially in Korea Taiwan Thailand

right now we're publishing Ragnarok Online there so in terms of indie games we have started this and have been doing this in the past three or four years so right now we are covering mobile titles PC titles and also console titles so in terms of the indie timeline so the company foundations is actually in 2002 and also we established and co-founded tap-tap in 2016 so our first in the game is called the swords it's from a Taiwan developer called Sun Hat games we licensed its mobile version and published in mainland China and after that we have actually licensed more than 30 indie games so the left side is sorry sorry about the phones actually it's different on my laptop so the left side is the freemium mobile titles and you

can see we got Ragnar online and also several titles from nhn aiming all those very big developers in the world and also the the right side is the premium titles so as you can see we got titles from 505 games human fall flat mobile version and also brothers a tale of two sons and the very beloved mobile title is caught to the moon to the moon actually we've got the original license and we remake the game on mobile platforms so right now we're also working on a switch version to the moon which is it's gonna be released later this year so to sum up we got over 30 freemium mobile games over 30 premium games on PC console and mobile and we also invest in game media

game platforms developers and also publishers so these are the lists that these are indeed Titleist that's published by XD so as you can see some very famous ones are like human fall flat and also east water in outside of China the east water is published by choco fish so a short information about the platforms in China and how the things will go in the next few years so right now as similar to our games market outside of China there are console pc and mobile and so those with the start sign is that the china store will need jpp also known as the ISBN so right now in China Nintendo's which is a very fastly growing market and it's China story is

licensed by $0.10 so they're gonna announce something later this year I think so also PlayStation Xbox they all have China store a while if you want to launch a game on the China store you will have to apply for jpp you can either find a agency that can do that for you or you can find a local publisher to apply for jpp while the jpp will normally take over half a year for a game from overseas and it will require some dev work from the developer and in terms of the PC there are any game platforms while the top two will be right now the biggest and later this year I think steam is gonna do something about the steam china platform so about those Wii game and steam China will be requiring GA PP so if you are launching

a game in in China right now you can launch a game on steam without any limitation globally and also the mobile parts as Miley just right now Mobile is the biggest market in in China so as you guys already know that there is no Google Play in in China but instead a lot of Android stores and maybe over 50 of those and all of those will need a n SDK and also platform fees which is right now mostly on over 50% so later I'm gonna show you a detailed list so in terms of steam users so there are statistics that right now actually we thought this screenshot last week this is the steam global traffic from July the 6th to July the 12th so right now

this China traffic weekly is even more than the US traffic this is based on a whole week's traffic and there are right now over 3 million 3 and 12 million PC users in China and the by the time of to 2023 there will be 350 more 54 million PC users in China which is even bigger than the whole population of the United States so if you are launching a game in China don't ever forget about the mobile market this is the dominant market in China right now even several times of the size of other market according to according to the start contour calm which they released last month the Android users in China has surpassing 76% in China and right now I

always only takes over 22% and the others are very small markets so the top Android apps actually the first thing after the first five what those are are based on the user base but the last one I'm gonna let you know guys no more because right now in terms of pay to download games tap-tap is not the dominant one if you want to launch a game in China and the game's business model is pay to download don't ever forget to to contact tap tap or find a publisher that's gonna be available to released on tap tap because right now in terms of the market of premium games the tap tap users are more likely to accept the idea of pay to download and in terms of the platform

fee as you guys know App Store takes over 30% of the whole revenue right now and for in that purchases Tap Tap only takes like actually takes 0% for pay to download it takes around 5% so basically it's zero platform fee so what's the difference between tap tap and other Android stores in terms of user base it's not as big as other Android stores however in terms of the acceptance of pay to download it's by far the the most dominant Android Market in China so for the user base it has over 60 million users over 3 million daily active user and over sixteen point two million monthly active user for the premium titles like for the publishing title from us I see overall we launched the game for over two years and

across all platforms actually we launched in mobile console pc so over 2.6 million copies sold across a platform while over one point 65 million are from mobile platforms mostly from China of course and among those mobile copies sold over 70 million are from tap-tap so actually that the sales number are transparent on the tap tap stop prompts you guys can actually check later we have around half a hundred mm Android pay to download titles on tap tap because that we do need is B and on tap tap so there are not so many and pay to download titles so it's kind of a blue sea right now and on this platform so if you ever have a game that you won't want to launch in China and it's paid to download do not forget to contact them and besides I see we just launched actually PC version of muse -

its mobile version was launched at one year ago actually so the launching sequence is kind of not usual so right now we are celebrating over 1 million copies while over half a million is from tap tap downloads so the game console sells in China this is such a rough idea so before some PlayStation and Xbox legally entered China there were a great market area so people will buy consoles from from overseas so from Taobao they ship those consoles outside of China so before that we are all using Hong Kong store on PlayStation and actually we are all using Japan store I mean mostly artists in Japan store on Nintendo switch so after they allegedly enter China market the situation will change

dramatically so if you guys want to see more of the statics statistics you guys can go to neko partners they publish this report that should be smooth so what if you are a indie developer and you want to enter China market what you can do there are obviously two ways just published yourself or you find a local publisher yep so self publish and look if look for a publisher so in terms of self publish you can always do it on steam on App Store it doesn't really limit your exposure if you do not have GA PP or ISBN but the possibilities of your game being featured might be slightly influenced that by the fact the fact that you if you have GA PP so some developers as far as I know they combine both ways they sell publish on App Store and they look fun local publishers to do

their android or other local platforms this is doable so if you decide to sell publish devil thinks you can't do and of course the steps the first step is always game media game media is a way to reach out directly to local users so these are the major game media for core users especially those who accepts console pc so gee course in Chinese TV oh wow of course and gamer sky they used to do a lot of reports on on PC and consoles and in terms of the social network user base your answer is obvious the number one and in terms of the the console coverage our ping is also good shampoo is like those user community for for PC gamers so actually if this is not all of it you guys can actually check later or contact me to know more so contacting

them will be a very good idea if you want to step out into China you can either email them or actually message them on their social network accounts both are fine and they will be better for latest for overseas developers and also don't forget to reach out to the streamers actually the left side are the examples those are very popular for for the streaming platforms in China and then thus they their their revenue on the steam China region grows rapidly so like human fall flat pop G getting getting over with Bennett for tea and also for tonight the right side are the major streaming platforms like though you yeah Google streaming and also Billy Billy you guys all know that we are not having twitch or YouTube in here in China so these are the major platforms for streaming that you guys can contact

and also establish an account and also find those streamers on it just message them it will be will be good but mostly they are actually pay getting paid to make videos or streaming but that's another story some of the streamers are very friendly if they receive and email overseas they will pay attention to it and also influence it can kill else so these are the equivalent I mean so-called equivalent of YouTube in China but they are all very special for their own expertise like globally they are for their young gay gamers and also Tik Tok you guys don't know what's that very short and actually very short videos will be good on it and also Weibo we boys the biggest social networking in China they if you post a video on it it can it can get the chance of the mostly

amplified post reach on on it and also a see fun insta fun is like a another another version of a lability sorry but their user base is not as big as Billy Billy and speaking of social network I think this is a very good example of overseas developers they do really well and social network in China so white boy is actually the biggest social network in in China I mean besides that we chat moments kind of is a social network so Weibo right now they do have over four hundred and sixty-five million monthly active users so it has the same or similar mechanics of Twitter like if you share a post it can reach out to as many and actually most of your followers on it and you can comment you can like a post and yeah so if you guys want to know how

to do it really well just check out the official Weibo account of rusty lake you will be amazed it's even doing better there a lot of a lot of local developing developer web accounts and you guys might ask how to build up your user base on Weibo I think there are several easy ways to reach out to Chinese web boy users you can either post on your Twitter or Facebook you just say oh hey I in Weibo account and you will be you will be surprised how many Chinese users are following on Twitter and Facebook and then something we would do is that you can also let them gain media now that you are opening a web accounts when and what's the account yes they will help spread the news and there's another

tricky way that might be useful because right now our tap tap has all the information page of a lot of mobile mobile games and on it you might have thousands or over hundreds of thousands of followers on that page so you can also go to the tap tap operation team and claim that page so with that page you can actually send all the followers and use every single week so you can also post news to them that way we have a and Weibo account and those users will follow back you in very good right so there's an example of how we run in wibble accounts so the as I said the sharing mechanism is like Twitter and ways to reach out to them is like first of all be who you are

don't don't copy any of the big companies wording it's not good for in English developer you can say exactly the same thing in Chinese or even the English on with the thing you say on Twitter or Facebook people like the way it is that people like to like the developer to be casual and also try to interact try to reply to as many comments as you can because replying on Weibo it's not like on Twitter it gets a thing on your Twitter feed on Weibo it does not so you can reply to as many as of those and the user will will interact with you and and get their attention and also just just be casual so the way you run your Twitter accounts can work perfectly perfectly on Weibo so you can actually get over hundreds of thousands of followers on Weibo and after that you can easily spread every single

announcements after you get them those are the user base of your China market and thank you this is my email if you have any question please do let me know thank you [Music]