Dealing with 10 app stores is harder than dealing with 400 app stores, says iDreamcast's Jeff Lyndon

[Music] okay so it's pocket gaming beers and we're in shanghai for the china joy conference we're checking out some of the cool chinese developers and publishers and we're with uh with jeff from my dreams guy nice to meet you jeff nice to meet you guys so what does our dream sky do tell us tell us about what you get up to so iron guy is a mobile game professional founded in 2009 uh we have been publishing like really popular games in the west uh to china uh including games like amber bird strip ninja temple run doodle uh recently we also brought in our nimble quest okay you can show us your your fan you've got the nimble quest one there's this nice one yeah temple you gotta show the temple run one this website it's very it's very hot so we these are useful useful fans at the moment yeah so you know we also bring fish out of water to china and of course you know uh most of you fans probably have heard the half rick's new game colossal kron we're also going to do that for for china so uh you know i dream sky is one of the biggest uh uh game platform in china we have over 260 million registered users with 60 million

maus cool and what does i mean we know you know we played some of these games in the western markets how how much they changed to bring them to china what kind of stuff doesn't well you know the core mechanic itself cannot be changed like you know for for example like we work on doodle drum right now okay right and and and you know we can't change john mechanic we can say like you know we don't want to jump jump jumping game right then then might as well not take through the job i think the biggest thing that needs to be changed you know is that is how it monetized you know the the strategy of monetization you know with the the the ui positioning the uh the user experience and for example like one of the things that we find out is like you know people will not search for a store so like you need to put your store uh a button in like a very prominent area where in the west you know you can put the store in the in lower area and if people want to buy stuff they're going to go there buy stuff right uh another example is you know like uh um we find that chinese player because they don't have that uh uh uh history of playing games you know you

can expect like you you're working on with uh you your game is being played by gamer or anyone that have played any sort of thing before so for example like you know if if i give you a game which is like a fighting game and then you see a d-pad on it and a putt and two buttons you you automatically would want to try you know doing like you know down up right you know punish to see like is there some something happening right but like if you give this to like a chinese gamer like and especially if he's his first game then you'll go like what am i supposed to do okay right so this is why you've been taking a lot of the kind of quite casual kind of obviously fruit ninja pretty hopefully straightforward what you're doing exactly and that's been and you've been pretty successful with that i mean fruit ninjas done yeah great numbers you know for a ninja and temple run you know uh i i dreams guys the only company right now in china that have you know more than two games in like top 10 android charts across almost every app stores but we were kind of chatting before and you're kind of saying obviously you're taking a lot of kind of western american and and those kind of territory games

and now you're looking slightly different territories so can you talk a bit about that yeah you know um if you look at the chinese gaming market uh mmrpg or web browser games or you know any sector you will see that you know it always started with people like to play this type of game like mobile game for example and they'll find out like the only good quality mobile games is maybe in the west hence you can only play western mobile then the korean and japanese games start coming in and they were like you know yeah quality wise western game is good but culture wise and you know how game how the game play is is not really for chinese and the korean japanese game is pretty much the same quality then you see players start moving their taste to korean japanese game and then after a while you will see a chinese game company actually managed to learn enough you know and then being able to produce the same quality being able to produce you know the same kind of mechanic and game gameplay but then the most important part is the same

culture the culture that you want so you know i believe this is also happening in the mobile industry you know i'm seeing like less and less uh western game managed to get like very good results in china uh i'm sussing korean japanese game coming to china you know started with a win runner up uh came to china uh and recently we also signed a deal with uh death sister uh okay run which is the number one company uh uh uh and uh we're going to launch a q run and i guess the other thing about the chinese market is it it obviously there's like 400 app stores and that seems that seems to be changing a bit and uh what's your kind of view on how that that kind of trend on the channel side most people would think that you know because it's it's used before the app store is so difficult to do now it's becoming 40 stories so much easier it's actually even harder now okay um because dealing with 400 store you can actually hire many people to do it and it's just meant it's just a matter of labor labor resource but when it's just 10 store you know then

it's fighting for resource and that is not labor resource anymore that's actually a mind game that's actually power struggle and there's a lot of politics involved um so i think it's even harder in the future in the future to fight for these top spots but you guys you guys are kind of in the lead of this so the the big thing everyone's waiting for in china is is wechat launching it's kind of it's games platform and and you guys are kind of you're in there whenever it launches we don't know well you know uh the wechat gaming platform have kind of soft launched already you know there are uh internal uh uh games that uh it's made by uh tencent that is integrated um with the wechat uh gaming part of it but uh what is interesting to uh uh viewers of pocket gamer business when our attention going to take in third party developers um and uh the current only announcement that tencent made the first launch of games that is going to launch in the tencent uh in the wechat platform will be fruit ninja and temple run which both of them is um is itunes guys products

and actually the whole the all the development of how to develop a wechat version for temple run and furlinger is done by itunes guy oh cool good we look forward to that whenever it happens thanks for your time jeff all right thank you you