How iDreamsky made Fruit Ninja and Temple Run successful in China

thank you you're too kind and uh you know I'm not as cool as he said I am I'm pretty much a Down to Earth game developer I've been developing games for 11 years already and I founded Adrian's guy in 2009 focusing on publishing games in China and we have been quite successful in bringing some of the western titles like Fruit Ninja Temple Run subway server and we're also moving on to Korea now bring cookie run into China so um today I want to share with you on how to be successful in China and some of the key things that you need to be aware of when you work in China by yourself or with a publisher um is your publisher doing this for you or have you considered these kind of

problems that you're going to face in China so a little bit introduction of bedroom sky so right now we have over 140 million iOS user base with 300 million Android user base um we have over three games on the top 10 uh we have over three games on the top 10 uh charts on various China App Store we're the number one Revenue driving for the carrier building uh that was just explained by my games and our currently monthly turnover is over 12 million U.S so the first thing is uh you know in the west a lot of the developers especially Korean developer they then everything bandwidth is an issue for the smartphone situation so this is a a chart showing you a seller average salary of a Chinese citizen and an average salary of a Korean Citizen and the average salary of a U.S citizen so in order to get a 5G

data plan so you have five gigabyte of data to use in China on 3G network it will cost you 100 US dollar all right currently with China mobile or any sort of operators that's 15 of his uh monthly income all right if you do it in U.S you do it in Korea it's 1.7 so you can see that a lot of Chinese users of course would not afford this kind of money for a 3G data plan or a 5G data plan so most of them what do they get they get maybe a 100 megabyte and that will be a good uh data data plan for them already now imagine if they're getting 100 data byte and they're downloading your game that is 60 Mac to them even if your game is free it's not free to them you're taking up 60 of their monthly data plan so you know and on the other hand is like like game size other than your game size is going to affect your conversion ratio because people don't have that much of data plans then they will use Wi-Fi to download their games but then that means it limits their the download

usage of your games like they can download your games on bus and with casual games actually a lot of these casual gamers when you're on the subway you see someone playing a cool game you want to download it and then you real then really realized that by downloading this game it's going to take up 60 60 or even a 100 of all your data for the month you're not going to do it all right the other problem that you have is with a lot of casual games you have a lot of internet connections um and you know using a megabyte or maybe five megabyte uh an hour of playing the game seems like a very normal situation in fact five megabyte is kind of small for Western Standard but again if you think about from a Chinese player if he plays five games a week uh over a month each game takes five megabyte in an hour 100 megabyte is not good it's not good enough for him so he's going to be very very cost conscious on how much uh bandwidth consumption your game uses and he's also been going to be very con uh conscious of how big your game is

so you know uh one of our uh uh Chinese uh players have also Zhu Kong have also say culturalization is really really important in China and why is it so important so let's look at some of the uh difference of Chinese and the Western culture so on the side you see a Pisa from Italy and every time a Milan uh partner comes to China when they look at the pizza in China they go like whoa this is not a pizza this this is this is abomination all right um some of my Yahoo friends in the early days when they come to China and they look at the Cena webpage which is basically kind of a clone of the Yahoo s page back then they look at it and say like why is there so many words it's so crowded with words or words there's almost no image why is that right so you know the reason is is because of this a lot of people think that you know although China is opened up you know a

lot of Western goes to China but actually the Chinese people that really understand the Western culture or is really intact with the international culture is still limited to a couple problems in China like Shanghai Beijing Guangzhou which is the international City the tier one city but then when you look at uh suburb the the tier 2 City the tier 3 City where actually most of your user base if you want to be success in China is there they don't they actually don't have that much of information of the West they don't to them Pisa is what I just showed you this actually when they go to Italy they would say like this pizza is not traditional pizza and I've met a lot of these Chinese people so if you don't culturalize your game you know you might work on the first tier City but when you go into the second and third tier City where most of the population is your game starts falling apart

and another interesting statistic is that actually if we look at 10 cents uh uh 10 cents a reason annual report a lot of the money is actually made in the second tier and third tier City why you may ask like shouldn't the first tcd people have more money to spend they're richer they're more educated they should be spending more money but that's not the truth the truth of First Tennessee player is first is they get all kinds of entertainment format forms they can go karaoke they can go to Bar then go to disco they go out to have dinner with their girlfriends they have lots of things to spend their money on second is because of all these information they get they actually change this game really rapidly today is Angry Bird tomorrow is for Ninja tomorrow the next day maybe he saw a friend to play Temple Run he started playing Temple Run so it's very hard to increase it's very hard to maintain a high retention University to your city but when you go to the second tier the third tier even

the fourth tier City where they don't get a lot of information on a daily basis they make like Western information like only like on a monthly basis when you hit them when they start playing your game and when they pay for your game they actually stay in your game for over a month and because they don't have that much money to they don't have elsewhere money to spend they spend it in games so what we also find out is the disposable income for games in the second tier in the 30th city is actually higher than the first year City in the first history we will call a well that has spent over ten thousand Renminbi oh well and the second tier City it starts from 550 000. one some of our most uh paying users is actually in Coal Mines province that he spent over a million Roman B playing our games every month just call us directly and say I want to deposit a million remember me playing your games now other than culturalization actually

the more important part is the monetization strategy so this is a case of Temple Run so when we got Temple Run uh last year at February um Keith at this revive mechanism which is you use a gem when you die there's a pop-up thing do you want to save me if you want to save me there's a gem and there's also a Time bar which is kind of like pushing you to decide do you want to revive right now and as you revive the the gem count increases and I'm sure everyone here have played Temple Run so I don't need to go in detail we launched this version of the of Temple Run in China what we realized later on with our data analytics tells us is actually a lot of people press save me the first time and then because they don't have gems what happens is they get a pop-up the pop-up say how many gems you want to buy you want to buy 50 gems you won't buy a

thousand hundred dams you want to buy 500 gems you won't buy a thousand gems and a lot of people actually drop from that point onward they didn't they just decide like you know what I'll restart the game now actually if you think about it this saved me mechanism and it's being used in a lot of games it's actually a very impulsifying Behavior right I mean you can restart your game it takes you like two minutes and why why why why pay for it right it's impulsive it's it's that very moment you feel like I'm in such a good feeling I I got to this high school already I got so far already I want to revive right now and no matter how much it is I will revive right so it's impulsifying behavior and impulsifying behavior means that person is going to give you three seconds if that you make a decision duration more than three seconds then it doesn't fit with an impulsive buying Behavior so what we did is instead of using gems we also provide an extra

button which is called Quick Revive instead of using gem you can just press that button and it directly Builds on your SMS one dollar one running bee per time that's it you don't need to think about like it's increasing over time you don't need to put in your user ID you just press it done you go you start playing that avoid people from buying gems second thing is we give them more reason just impulsive buying Behavior right how can you increase that in posting by Behavior explain to him like Hey you're now on the top of 35 on the whole scoreboard you know how much more do you need to get to uh uh exceed your friend's best score that will increase the impulsive buying Behavior whoa I'm I'm so close to Chris I've spent so much time beating Chris I'm like just 10 from Chris I will buy the gems right now over time what happens is a very interesting uh situation happen is over

time people start pressing their one running bee per part and then after five to six times he started realizing and say like okay I spent six birming B already I revived six times but if I buy gems with six reminbi how many times can I revive oh actually I can revive 20 times then he's then then that becomes a logistic a logical buy right he starts going into the episode and say like okay I can buy 100 gems for six RMB or I can buy 20 uh Tony romimbi and I get like 500 gems well I've used experiment B in the past hour already I may as well just buy the biggest pack so after all this conversion after all these changes of the monetization hooks it turned out that we have a much better Revenue generating a lot of users start going to the gem store without because going to the because he don't have enough gems he actually go there voluntarily and buy a big Jam pack instead of just buying the small Jam

pack now then some people tell me like well Jeff then China is all about putting a lot of monetization Hope trying to make the game milking as much money as possible trying to make the game so hard all right and every level you need to kind of use money to revive now that would work if you don't care about your brand Integrity if you want to make a game that is all about like you know what I don't care I just want money now this is a a a statistic that we got from 360. so Temple Run 2 that is distributed by either Sky have been down to over 100 million times just on 360. and there's 3 000 negative review over a year and this is a plan for a zombie and they got 50 million downloads uh over time and they already is pushing three thousand negative reviews and for a brand Integrity if you're thinking about you have merchandise right you are going to make do uh offline events having all these negative review is not going to be

good for you another case is then some people come tell me and say like you know what I care about brand new Integrity so much that you know what I'm not going to put any monetization hoax and because my game is so successful in my own country it might work you know if I just integrate with all the billing system in China it should work right no it doesn't so windrunner which is a very very massively popular Japanese and uh game on um line and Korea they came to China they work with one of the biggest platform 363 and 360 give them heaps and loads of traffic like over like 50 million down uh traffic in just a month none of none of the Publishers ever have got got something like that because 360 is like well we are publishing this this is our first title that we're publishing we can give it a lot of traffic and developer decide you know what I'm not going to change the game what happened after a month they're not even in top 10 download charts because

people just don't pay eventually platforms design like I'm wasting my I'm wasting my traffic I might as well give it to someone like Idris guy or give it to someone like Joo Kong which actually helped me to make money with my traffic so never think about going into China without changing your monetary stress monetizing strategy and never think about doing over doing it now another uh uh just now uh my games have also shared like you know some developers decide to ignore China in the launch strategy they're like you know the market is very chaotic I don't know what to do there's a lot of work blah blah blah blah blah all kinds of reasons let's just ignore it if I don't launch it then it's not my problem anymore so the speed and piracy of clones in China is crazy all right it's crazy the minute you put your app on an Android app so I don't care which region you're on you can put it on Canada you

can put on New Zealand you can be putting it on South Africa your game will be pirated momentarily all right so with fruit ninja we have observed it before before they got published by iTunes guide within an hour we have 30 major sites having the pirate version already within 10 days all 200 major websites have a priority version Distributing on their website within three months if your game is a mega hit you will start seeing clones all right in a year there's 40 clones on top of that red your trademark is being registered in China so ignoring Chinese strategy means that unless you you make a very cautious decision and saying I will never go into China I will ignore China for the rest of my life for the rest of this game for the rest of this brand if not ignoring China means you're just creating a bigger problem for yourself later on foreign