How to Enter the World's Largest Mobile Marketplace

[Music] thank you thank you guys very much listen my name's Aaron and I am as you may have heard before I work for AB 2t and what we deal with is getting developers into the mainland Android Chinese marketplaces so this talk is everything you need to know about the Chinese mobile market so I will try and condense that into 15 minutes and hopefully you guys can learn something about China and if you're interested in publishing this can answer some of your questions so thank you for moving the chairs let's just go over the Chinese mobile market it's around thirty seven

point nine billion dollars in game revenue it's the world's number one largest mobile market there are currently around 691 million mobile gamers and you know 27 percent of worldwide gaming spending is from China so I'm sure you all already know that China is a huge market but these are just some of the numbers to be highlighted so in terms of the market size and the growth rate we can see that the market size is going to continually increase and increase the growth rate has slowed a little bit this is due to many reasons one it's just the market cap and another was in 2018 there was a pause on Gaming approvals which really slowed down the market so this was the the pause in gaming

approval so each new game that enters China needs to have some documents from the Chinese government during 2018 they pause this application which a lot of the main players you can see in 2017 Tencent had a 49 percent year-on-year revenue growth in 2018 it almost dropped in half you can see Nettie's actually went into the negative those are two of the biggest publishers in China and it really just shows that this gaming approval freeze really hurt all countries sorry all companies inside of China but actually they have resumed the game approvals yay we can all cheer so in 2019 at the end of 2018 they decided to revamp the approval procedure and this is taken from 2019 h1 user

acquisition white paper that you can find online just type in app to tee 2019 you a white paper and you can see these are the approvals during each month so January there were 560 new games approved February it dipped because the Chinese New Year most people go back to their hometowns and yet you can see the the trend of new gaming approvals has returned to a pre ban rate which is great news for people trying to enter China monthly active users in the mobile game industry we can see here the in the second in the early half of 2019 increased by over 70 million so there were 70 million more monthly active users in China if you look at June there are around 6.9 too so there are over six hundred and ninety two million mobile gamers in China during June and you can

see here just like the monthly active users normally stays around the same with over 600 million monthly active mobile gaming users which is crazy that's that's more than that's like double the size of the United States population just playing mobile games always blows my mind so if there are around 1.3 9 5 billion people in China it means around half of China plays mobile games which you know it's bigger than consoles is bigger than PC mobile games in China it has taken off for many reasons not only the accessibility of smartphones and the fact that smartphones are readily available for all Chinese citizens but also the fact that there are hundreds of app stores and hundreds of developers making games for Chinese mobile users another point I wanted to talk about was female gamers in China we can see this demographic is really increasing in the latest in the

late years so there are around 367 million Chinese female game players in April 6.4 percent from the month before so during the first half of 2019 Chinese female players they they jumped to 13.5 percent year-on-year consumption so almost 3.5 billion dollars just from Chinese female gamers which is a huge market so we're seeing a lot of games tailoring to the female market in China which is a good idea a lot of idle games a lot of dress-up games a lot of cosmetic games they can be really profitable with the Chinese female users in in with the Chinese female users in China and for instance the Qing glory I don't know if any one of the youth heard of Qing glorious one of the biggest

games in China it's a 10 cent game over 54% of the players are females so there's one one example of a game where there are more females playing than men so let's take a hypothetical example I'm an indie developer and I've just made my first game it's called go-go football and I put my heart and my my passion into this project and now I want to release it in China so what are the next steps for an indie developer such as myself to publish my game in China you can see I'm a little island off the coast so the first the first obstacle or the first challenge that you may want to think about is fragmentation so in in China there's no Google Playstore so that means that there's hundreds of Android app stores that have spring up to fill that hole in the market for instance though you tap tap highway or

post Xiaomi that there are literally hundreds of Android app stores where people will download their games so what do I do do I build a different version of my game for each app store that's gonna take me a lot of time how do I apply to these different app stores as a challenge next up is regulations for example I can't show any blood in my game if I do show blood that I have to think about ways around it perhaps turn it green for instance in PBG they turn the blood green to get rare past this regulation I can't show any violence I can't share any pornography any politically sensitive content oh so you have to really there's a list of regulations to get into China and how will me is an independent developer how do I know these regulations who it's it's like hidden behind like a Chinese legal system localization so my game is

on the Google Play Store and it has facebook login you know Twitter login those aren't compatible in China so how do I localize my game not only translation but so that Chinese users can have a localized version for their app stores so these are some of the problems that I would come against as an independent game developer now one tidbit if my game has in-app purchases what is the process for me so any game with in-app purchases requires two documents from the Chinese government an ISBN license or a publishing license and an IP protection certificate with these two documents I can then have in-app purchases in my game without them I cannot now these take around six to nine months even with the resumption of the game approvals and can cost around four thousand dollars

but if you want to monetize your game effectively and of course in-app purchases is one of the best way to monetize your game you will need these two documents there's no way around it even ten cent they made Call of Duty mobile which is the most successful mobile game ever still not available in China because they don't have these two documents so there are some traditional publishing practices I can take my games to some of the Chinese publishers for instance $0.10 Nettie's but my game has maybe I don't know a thousand downloads on the Google Play Store are these big publishers really gonna invest or use the capital to take my game most likely not they're going to be thinking what's our return on investment they're not gonna even let me in the door really unless my game has millions and millions of downloads and high retention and high profit like the metrics of this game aren't high enough so I've already gone

to the first step the traditional publishing practice and the doors been shut in my face so what's next for me so what the app is app Tootsie so this is our motto here it's dest so we are the most direct way into the Chinese market place where equitable it means we're open for everyone we're fair to everyone everyone can submit their apps and games to us with speedy you can have your game published within 10 days from submission to SDK integration into publication and we're transparent we show all of the data on our partner portal so you're you're able to see all of the data for your games and all of the key metrics that you'd like to see so we have a very simple service it's called our SPP this is our register so

you register on our partner portal you can do it in just one click you submit you submit your apk file to us our team will review it you plug we have our Super SDK which means that you can publish your game in multiple stores you don't need to make a different version for each store you install one SDK and then you can be published on all of our alloyed app stores and then the last step is publish so it's our SPP register you register on our portal submit your game plug our SDK and then have your game published on the Chinese Android app stores so the previous challenges that I covered how does app duty overcome them so firstly fragmentation Google Play is banned there are hundreds of app stores there's different requirements for each store how does that 2t solve this problem we have more

than 25 partnered allied stores that we can distribute your game in these are the some of the top stores in the Android Market and our super SDK allows for multi store publications for one build of your game so this fragmentation we've consolidated it to make it easier for you to distribute in China with your just one build localization war games launched in China they have to be localized of course they need simplified Chinese text foreign foreign payment methods and foreign social networks are not permitted so they need to be removed from the game so how do we solve this we offer a thousand words free translation to each project submitted to us so we will translate your game for free for up to the first initial thousand words this isn't just Google Translate this is translation done by seasoned professional gamers we have full integration of local payment options for instance a leap a WeChat pay

I stab Union pay and local advertising networks so that we can show local ads to local users and so that you can make money based on these are ad platforms and we have local social network compared compatibility - so like WeChat login Weibo login all of this Chinese social media apps and finally monetization so for instance if you were to submit an in-app purchase game we would recommend that you first launch a ads monetized game first to test the Chinese market to start increasing your user player base and then after that if you would like to submit an in-app purchase version of your game app - - will help with the application and monitoring of the documents to the Chinese government so we will apply for

the IP protection and the ISBN license on behalf of our partners and as I've said before our SDK integrates all the necessary protocols and local ad networks so that you can monetize your game effectively the eCPM in China is like I said before it's just below the USA so ads monetize games can actually make quite a fair amount of money so what does app Tootsie do we provide the login options the data mining we have a data mining tool in our SDK so you can keep track of stores users by location I'll go more into that and we provide local payment options so when your in-app purchase game is ready they are able to use their local payment options so they don't need to use PayPal or visa it's not accessible in China they can instead spend a lot of money on

your game through their local payment systems so these are some of the data metrics that we will be able to provide our partners users the daily active users the new users the user retention which stores are providing the most users the ads impressions the ads clicks the amount of money total money that you're earning geography where in China they downloading their your game where are your most active users it could be in Beijing it could be in Shanghai there's a big country device is we even have information on what type of device your users are using what resolution they're playing your game at their connection method are they connecting through Wi-Fi they're connecting through a 4G 5g and transactions for in-app purchases you can measure all of your transactions through your billing points so it's comprehensive data that you can find on

the partner portal once you register and submit a game so we we partnered with Unity Technologies we're one of the stores on Unity Technologies UDP initiative which is not the network protocol this is the Unity distribution portal so it's an initiative for developers to publish their games in markets from around the world we are one of the partners for the Chinese market this is our CEO he just said app to tea and unity share the same common objective of solving the problem of game distribution to multiple app stores in local mark it's with unity developers ability to now access the Chinese market this is the beginning of many opportunities to come so for any developers that use unity you can find us on the unity distribution portal and submit your games to us there or you can come to us directly so I hope that gave you an

insight into the Chinese mobile market some of the challenges some of the solutions the apptivity provides you can find us on all of the social medias we have many chichi tutorials which is our tutorials for our partners about how to submit their games how to do the SDK integration we're very active on YouTube and Facebook and Twitter so finally I will just leave you with this please fasten your apps and games we are landing in the Chinese market so I think that's me done for time thank you very much [Applause]

so no you don't need that to come to us what you would do is our basic plan is free you'll be published in free app stores for free once you start thinking about the in-app purchase route you upgrade your service plan so for the IP protection if it's for the IP protection certificate is $200 for that for the total package with the ISBN and the IP protection certificate is four thousand dollars in total I love hi there Thanks are there any gdpr or CCPA like legislations in the Chinese market that developers would need to be aware of there are many to many like that there are some for you to be aware of I can't I can't to pacifically name

them off the top of my head I hope you understand that but with app 2t we will really just like we're here to guide you through the whole process so if your app or game was against any of those regulations we would let you know what you would need to do to make sure it would be able to be approved [Applause] you [Music]