How to increase wishlists & game sales from China? Growth marketing tactics & case study

foreign [Music] how are your energy levels today on a scale of 1 to 10 very good okay cool awesome so go on to come sit in the front row we need the energy all right that's a how hello everyone please try to repeat after me oh very good okay now you know how to start a speech in Chinese how literally means hello everyone so while I Was preparing for for today's speech I got kind of philosophical I started to imagine what the game in this

industry is going to look like in five to ten years and well one thing is certain I think China is going to have some kind of influence on the um on the whole industry when it comes to marketing when it comes to Game Regulations you name it when it comes to PC games because that's the topic I'm going to focus on on today we have two versions of steam no one knows what's going to to happen within a few years but it's definitely going to be exciting what's also exciting is the fact that the results of the case study I'm going to present to you and the tactics that we use to achieve the results are well result of almost a year of hard work of me and my team kind of Paving the way

um exploring Chinese market because well there aren't that many benchmarks when it comes to well how to increase the topic of today's conversation so so that the data the tactics I'm going to to share today with you I hope you find them useful in your everyday work normally when I start to start those presentations and I introduce myself I tell you that I used to work at Bank of China I used to live in China and used to work as a freelance translator for intellect stream Masters for Gwen's tournaments etc etc but I'm not I'm not going to tell you that instead I'm going to tell you a story um so when I was in high school I used to be a pretty hardcore World of Warcraft player I have my first job application was actually to guilt on burning Legion and

we used to do raids like four times a week well when I moved to China moved to Shanghai started living there I decided to give Chinese version of Wawa tribe so my first surprise was the fact that well you don't really buy a monthly subscription you buy the game time so I bought like 7 000 minutes or something logged in and started playing when I was leveling in Westfall I met a Chinese player we we started started talking and became friends and the moment he realized that I wasn't Chinese well I told him that I'm from Poland um he immediately wanted to do all me he immediately wanted to PK to fight with me to to see who's better and wanted to engage with me even more okay what does the story tells us when it comes to Chinese players first of all

they are highly competitive and for you as a developer or a marketing manager who wishes to enter Chinese social media channels and engage with your audience engage with with Gamers with influencers um you'd be surprised to find out how eager your audience is to engage back to to provide you with feedback to record videos etc etc so how about you guys um please raise raise your hands people who are actively promoting your games on the Chinese market on Chinese social media okay we have cool who wants to try it okay cool um so I hope some of the tactics um I'll present today you'll find them find them useful

but it's not not all green it's not perfect and not easy a Chinese market well first of all um I strongly recommend you to watch Damian yashkovski's presentation from last year because when we talk about different digital landscape well Chinese digital landscape is vastly different from from the one in the west not only when it comes to the main platforms such as Billy Billy Darwin huias Etc but also to to media and to platforms that are dedicated to certain consoles or or mobile so we have a different digital landscape that's the first thing second thing as I imagine some of you might know is the fact that in order to get published in China on a local distribution channels you need to have an ISBN license it's a pain in their ear

as to say because getting such license requires at least let's say nine months to a year or even more and there are only limited number of companies that might get it but if your game is on global version of steam Chinese players can still buy it so that's the thing with ISBN also when you don't have an ISBN license you cannot really do any paid marketing by paid marketing I mean let's say ads on ongoing of course you can interact with certain platforms and do certain paid marketing activities within those platforms but you cannot really you know throw um bigger amounts of money on on your paid traffic or your Performance Marketing campaigns because you're basically not allowed to another barrier is is language that's

kind of obvious but at the same time it needs to be to be said that well Chinese Gamers do not really speak Chinese well English um and you need to have at least someone within your team or your partners that are helping you who might who knows the language time difference is obvious when it comes to content adjustments um well it's not to say that you need to adjust every single piece of content because most of the times let's say you're working on a space simulator like X4 one of our clients ego soft um so the trailer for for the global version was basically the same as as the one we published on Chinese social media but at the same time you need to take into consideration uh local local laws so that

you basically want to get banned there's a there's a hitch there when influencer publishes something they take responsibility for the content when you publish something on your official channels obviously you take responsibility um because of the fact that platforms are different that you need to know Chinese uh well oversight is harder you need to have um at least need to know how to navigate those those platforms and I'm going to talk about it a little bit more and lack of benchmarks I mentioned before but when it comes to strategy if you're a PC developer like one fourth like 20 of your player base uses Chinese can you afford not to talk to them for me it's more of a question of

resource allocation and finding the most cost effective way to be able to engage with with your player base so it's not a question of if but rather how so imagine this a real situation that happened more than a few times let's say you're a marketing manager in a Game Dev Studio suddenly you see a spike in wish lists few thousand just let's say five thousand one day eight thousand the other okay what happened I didn't see any influencer materials any any videos published on on Western social media so where are those wish lists coming from you might ask so the first question we need to answer is where do they come from okay second one is what exactly happened

and the third one and I think most important in this in this case is how can we repeat it how can we build on it how can we add to it how can we Implement um this Leverage to our marketing strategy so long didn't read well the obvious question is what happened some influencer posted a video but if I were to tell you okay so register account on Billy Billy on WeChat DM that influencer in Chinese then later on try to negotiate with them on on WeChat you might say well um thank you but now so hence this meme um but it's not as hard as you might think and I'm going to go into more detail about so the first question is where is it

coming from where are those wishes coming from so these are the three main platforms you need to consider obviously there are more than than just these three but if you're a PC developer most likely um influencer who posted the video posted uh it on one of these first two platforms so Billy Billy dawian and highbox the first one so as YouTube slash twitch of course I'm simplifying a little bit um that is focused entirely on games and anime and with almost 90 million daily active users you're talking about uh big big platform so how do we use it first of all we

establish your presence there so we register the account of a particular developer or a publisher post a video a trailer gameplay just to increase the credibility and then use it for the influencer Outreach influencer Outreach is going to be the main topic of of the later part of of this presentation because it has proven to be the most time effective and cost effective when it comes to having an impact on increasing the game say game sales themself moving on second platform is heybox you might have heard about it it's a local it's first of all it's an app one thing you need to keep in mind is that more than 90 of the traffic in China is on mobile so when Chinese players engage with your with your games with with the content you you post most

likely they're doing it using their their mobile phones so highbox is an app that has both like distribution Channel properties and social media um a screenshot shown here is a main page of infection freeze on one of the projects we've been working on and what data can you find here how how's how learning about highbox is useful for you well for one um Chinese players can wish list their games there and those wish lists do not really appear on your Global steam steam page so it's a different um different source of wish list and here you can see 7.21 which is around 72 000 wish list which is not a small number so it's just by downloading highbox learning about your game

performance there you can have a bigger like more full of a picture to know what's what the Chinese players are are into what what are their opinions because they can comment on on your games page two it's connected to the global version of steam it's automatically scraps the data also one important thing to mention here is that you can sign the distribution agreement with highbox or other platforms like like songfo which is purely um Revenue share based so that they will promote your game on the platform itself and sell it through that platform third platform I I mentioned who here uses Tick Tock please raise your hand okay so one third of the of the audience well when it comes to

um games in China doing is the best for mobile mobile games mostly due to the fact that the marketing funnel is shorter Chinese players can basically click on the ad and download the game pretty easily unfortunately um you cannot again no ISBN no paid traffic so if you were to enter though in you'd have to and rely entirely on organic traffic which is not going to be really that effective of course you can give it a try to be more client-facing to put your content out there but I'd recommend to use it mostly for outreach and engagement at least at the early every stages the screenshots here is from one of the videos posted by influencer about havendoc one of the games we've we've been working on and

this video was actually the source of if I remember correctly at least three to four thousand wish lists and it's the video from the beginning of the presentation the story I I'll told you about so suddenly you have a few thousand wish list okay so what to do what to do next establish presence reach out to that influencer thank them show them appreciation and maybe share some keys for future cooperation so that they might produce more content okay so let's let's give it a try I'd like to invite you to check the Billy Billy by yourselves so enter please try to enter this this address and search for maybe the game you're working on currently or the game that's you're really interested to to learn more about

and when you no worries you can enter you can put in the game name in English uh very often Chinese influencers put the game titles in English too so what it will show you is the grid of videos posted about uh the game you're into so that would be the first step in getting to know what's out there on the on the Chinese internet what are the Chinese players what are Chinese influencers saying Next Step would be to if we were to try to engage with them establish presence reach out to them thank them for posting content establish relationships so that later on we can add those influencers to the whole marketing mix and treat treat it as another distribution channel for announcements for new content for new updates

Etc and for full immersion you can try to do a little exercise and try to find those those characters which literally means sort by most popular popular ones how is it going did anyone manage to to find your game if not I can help you after after after the talk Okay so the second question we need to answer so what's the current situation so we check Billy Billy Don and highbox we're mapping out how many videos were published on each platform mapping out influencers putting them into Google spreadsheet file so that later on we can reach out to them and check the wish lists and comments on heybox itself what it will tell us is

the overall perception of the game and whether Chinese players are into it or not so how can I repeat it and this is the part where I'll start to um dive a little bit deeper into into the tactics themselves but generally speaking it's all about showing appreciation being close to to your audience and influencers themselves so luckily for us registering the account on on Billy Billy doesn't really require a Chinese phone number so you can use your European phone number your American phone number to register the account why is it um so so important because well in other cases in other platform platforms very often you need to go through very complicated process I need to apply for for permits prepare a lot of documents

me myself I when I was registering our official account on WeChat I had to take a picture holding my ID in one hand and the application in in other so luckily for us Billy Billy is just the phone number five to ten minutes and it works so again to sum up where these three platforms need to keep in mind Billy Billy doing on highbox what has the biggest impact on on wish list content produced produced by by influencers and how to repeat it well first try to established presence there and communicate with them weekly I've prepared a checklist for you [Music] these are basically the the assets that we need to or you need to if you were to do your Chinese marketing and house it's a basic one if you were to to to to to

start the influencer Outreach or any kind of marketing activities for that matter first one obviously a localized game again I refer you to Damian's speech from from last year where he goes into much more detail about why it's really necessary but obviously Chinese players do not speak English that not that many of them so you need to have your games game translated ready to go video assets at least one at least the trailer or a gameplay so that when you publish it on bdb you increase your credibility when doing the Outreach the influencers 30 to 50 keys and why this number well when you establish Billy Billy account there is a limit uh daily limit for the messages you can send it's six per day at the beginning by the way this this gesture is six in Chinese

um so that's why I'm doing it unconsciously so six per day at the beginning and then it moves up to 10 and later on there's there is no limit but at the beginning there are certain limitations that you need to take into consideration why at least 15 wishlist from China this is our recommendation for any developer who wants to build on on the interest who who doesn't want to burn their their resources or hmm yeah basically you need to build on the interest that is already there if there are no wish lists it's going to be a little bit harder at the same time if uh within let's say you're working on a road like or a game that on or a game genre that is particularly um popular in China then it's going to be a little bit easier because you can reach out to influencers who post content on about

those similar games but at the same time try to have at least 15 wishes coming from China before you put I mean like before you invest into into Chinese marketing itself next one obviously team member who can coordinate the activities whether if it's your Chinese publisher any kind of external partner or if you want to have your marketing in-house um then please pay attention to um okay I'm going to say it like this hiring someone who just speaks Chinese like a fresh graduate isn't really going to be that effective because you need to have at least some marketing know-how about let's say marketing funnel or knowledge about games themselves another one playable build I mean that's kind of obvious but at the same time uh

needs to be set so that influencer can record the the video and later on post it phone number to establish BPD account and the last one so Chinese knowledge about first of all the industry and about the game um and when Hua um knowledge on how to speak with influencers so that the whole communication is smooth it's Pleasant it's basically knowledge on how to establish relationships and the devil is in the details as always because you need to take into consideration a lot of um ways to let's say use emojis or use certain phrases in Chinese so you need to have that knowledge prior to doing the Outreach so let's plug in let's dive a little bit

deeper into the process itself so if you were to try to repeat this sudden spike in wish list or try to maintain it and repeat it in let's say every every two weeks [Music] what you should do is first of all do your research how we do it is um First Step mapping out all the content that was produced that was published about your game on Chinese social media these two platforms are the main ones so map out all the influencers our recommendation is to have a threshold of around 10 000 followers because well you have to consider your resources and doing Outreach to an influencer class below 1 000 followers isn't going to be that effective but at the same time if it all depends on your approach

if you want to focus on building a community and maybe try to have some of the influencers become later ambassadors of of your game as to say or give you give you feedback about it do the Outreach to all of them later on select three to five similar games and find out the influencers find the influencers who posted content about those similar games it's pretty basic when you compare it to the logic is very similar to the influencer Outreach you do on Western media channels but at the same time since the platforms are different different there are certain rules that are take into consideration so that's why it's not as simple as as it may seem at the at the very beginning so the Second Step would be registering the account and doing the Outreach how we do

it and believe me we've had our time of trial and error because it all depends off on the first of all the first message you're going to send and later on the overall like how you're approaching those influencers what's what's the overall attitude so our recommendation is is that as huchiao is do not try to be salesy push you do not try to make a transactional in any way because um one important thing to mention here the results of influencer out which I'm going to present to you uh later on today are all like non-paid corporations it's just us talking with influencers sharing the keys representing the studios and influencers posting content for free um so in order to make it happen we try to avoid any kind of you know

transactional nature because in the end we're all Gamers we want to help each other and some of the screenshots I'm going to show you are from the conversations with those influencers and they say literally the thing that I just told you so Outreach to them and then negotiating by negotiating I mean um basically listening to their feedback being open to their suggestions and building on the relationship so as I mentioned devil is in the details um so Doshi Yoshi trans we are all game developers so helping each other is is just just natural so no need for courtesies um so we all hope that

there'll be more and more great games appearing on the market and this is these are the messages from from one of the influencers so as you can see they're open to cooperation they they really want to help a thing that I ran pin this is this is pretty interesting because um it's uh it's a word that you could translate to English as more quality character and uh what I mean here is when you talk with your Chinese audience you need to consider the cultural difference and you need to consider [Music] um basically the way they communicate on WeChat they communicate online so be sure to add a lot of courtesy words or phrases be sure to

thank them every time um to basically show your appreciation and um it's going to be sincere and I I hope that that it will be um it's going to prove really effective moving on to one of the case studies last time I did a presentation similar to this one I presented a case study for games operators today I'm going to present you a pretty fresh one um game was called Heaven dock by different Tales different Tales was was the publisher and what we did for that studio was mostly influencer Outreach throughout three months and we helped to publish and localize some video assets so so trailer gameplays and published it on on Billy Billy

screenshot here is main page on on heybox the data shown here are reviews 4.9 is average play time four four thousand game game copies sold etc etc um so we're pretty proud of it because during during these three months we managed to establish relationships with almost 30 influencers of 15 of of which posted the content for free which led to [Music] wishlist increase on highbox by 6000 and almost 15 000 wishlists just from the Chinese market itself throughout that time one of the biggest achievements here is also the fact that we managed to establish relationship with a really big influencer with over 3 million followers which isn't that easy because

what I just told you about you know showing appreciation not being transactional well it ends when you reach a certain um when basically you reach out to bigger influencers it's going to be less effective that is not to say that they cannot post content for free if they like the game basically so again we did Outreach to influencers we selected the three um three to five similar games um so we reach out to influencers who posted content about those games try to get them interested uh in heaven dock um and did some Community Management on on Billy Billy itself so basically influencers influencers were the main leverage then posting content on bdb and this is an extent for from from our

report in in April so as you can see like 10 videos total number of of followers um and ongoing report from ongoing negotiation with with the new influencers leading up to release of of new videos part and so so to sum up when you see a spike in wish list coming from China it is most likely going to be the result of some Chinese influencer posting video what you could do is check bdb Chuck though in find out who posted the video when decide whether you want to reach out to them maybe try to repeat the process later on

monitor what's happening on highbox so that you can decide basically you need this data if you're going to make any strategic decisions when it comes to to Chinese market to have a full picture so content published on these two platforms plus High box and now since we have some time left I've prepared a question a list of frequently asked questions that we hear during presentations like like this one or basically networking on on events like Taipei game show London Games Etc and please allow me to jump into them of course [Music] yeah okay so so jumping into them of course they are pretty big so I'll try to be as brief as as possible so the

main question we always hear is does my gay does my game have the potential for Chinese market can it sell good on on Chinese market well um I just gave you the tools to find out for yourself because um of course things like genre things like platform so whether if it's PC Mobile switch Etc and considering the market share of that particular platform is important but at the same time if you're in the process of of your published version of steam there's something that players can engage with um you can check those platforms for the content you can check highbox it will give you some kind of indicator of the interest out there so what should I start with um where to begin the tactics and platforms I presented to you are just one of many

if you have ISBN license the whole conversation would be totally different also if you have a particular genre let's say you're developing a multiplayer game or um so maybe reaching out to esport organizations might be better it all depends but generally speaking you don't need that much and I refer you to the checklist I I presented before can I promote an erotic game in mainland China during last I think two months we had almost four leads for erotic games I don't know why suddenly the the spike but generally speaking um generally speaking no but because of the fact that any kind of erotic content will be loot content content will most

likely get banned on on platforms like Billy Billy or or doing and but to my surprise I found out that there were several Publishers and several game studios selling those games on highbox and somehow they managed to get a thousands of copies I need to dive deeper into that um so another one would be what are the main differences when it comes to Chinese Gamers and Western Gamers and actually we could talk about it for at least few hours but um the main difference being the fact that Chinese internet is mostly mobile and gaming like gamed of spaces also most like 90 of the market around 90 of the market is mobile so Chinese players will most likely play on their phones and to tell you a little story about that last time I went to a

type a game show um they had uh like on the main stage they had a candy crush kind of kind of game and they were playing it competitively so imagine uh Gamescom main stage playing mobile game competitively it's it's interesting to to to see that basically um and talking about you know Diablo Immortal or um we see the trend so mobile is here to stay definitely when it comes to other differences well Chinese gamers are pretty critical uh towards the games when we compare reviews on Steam to reviews on on highbox on average um the score is one point lower than than the one on on Steam so you need to be prepared and avoid any review bombing and

Etc another one is do I need a local publisher well obviously it all depends because local publisher can definitely help you but you need to consider whether you um whether are there any other options that you might explore first like for example signing a non-exclusive distribution agreement with with song4 or with highbox which doesn't really require you to pay any flat fees so entering new distribution Channel might might be easier that that way local publisher will definitely help you if you need any kind of support with local regulations and I wouldn't really recommend trying to to do to to adjust your game content without a

local partner or at least partner with industry know-how that you know had done went through this process themselves earlier on another question is how to track results well um how do we do it we basically track it track them manually so we monitor the videos that that were published and are in constant communication with with the dev team with the marketing team and monitor the impact on the wish list because um it gives us the feedback about which influencer was the most effective or had the biggest impact on on the sales but when it comes to tracking results for example of your Chinese partner or any partner in in the local local market for that matter um

some of our clients some of our partners have told us that they were facing some difficulties with getting to the bottom of what has actually happened on the on the Chinese social media channels because they received somewhat more whole somewhat like the report wasn't clear enough basically there was a lump sum of money we spent this much on marketing and these are the results and the results were good but the studios we were in talks with were like okay but how can I contribute maybe we can do something more maybe we can do something different so it was a it was a challenge for for these Studios because they didn't want their Chinese Partners to lose face in any kind of way meaning that they didn't want it to appear that they are questioning the the results in any way but at the same time they wanted to contribute so it was a well let's say a challenge on the negotiation level

at the same time we were hired by by one Studio to do uh let's say Market reverse engineering of the marketing in in China and we found out that the game was actually functioning in four different there were four different names for the game published on different platforms which has proven to have a negative impact on on the marketing itself because you know people who are basically entering different different names uh so so okay and I see that now is the time to end so mobile or consoles or crypto games if you want to to learn about these let's talk after the uh the presentation thank you very much [Applause] we still have our one question asked about mobile or consoles or crypto games or ask any other kind of a

question so uh yes please but could you please uh step out and go to make microphone ah hi I'm Mike I'm working with a Japanese gaming industry and like a quick question quick case study uh the game I was working on had about maybe 20 000 wish lists in China but super low conversions even though we discounted it many times and even have a special price for China like any recommendation what should be done for the next title um okay were you communicating with the uh with the player base at any any point in time no no just just team uh I think that would be my first recommendation because um they might Okay so first you need to get to the bottom of

this like what was the the reason try to engage with what I would do is establish presence and start communicating with with the player base with the people that watch the influencer videos with several influencers get in touch with them and um dive into uh influencer Community very often they have like WeChat groups WeChat groups can be up to 500 people and you can basically try to ask them directly try to get them to provide you with some kind of feedback any kind of Engagement would be nice also distribution channels let's say um okay you said you had 20 000 wish lists on Steam if there were 20 000 wishes on Steam from China I bet there were a few thousand wishlists on highbox too we can talk later on and I'll check the game on highbox so we can see what are the comments

saying uh maybe we'll find out find out there thank you very much thank you uh thank you very much let's give one more a round of applause [Applause] um