Marketing | Aleksander Ptak | Why Everything You Knew About Publishing in China Is Now Obsolete

Welcome all of you. Thank you for coming to the speech and as you can guess the main topic for today will be surprise China. So the title to be precise why everything about about China publishing in China is now obsolete. So moving to the uh profile and who I am. So my name is Alexander. I'm a key account manager at Huchawa games about which I'll be talking more about in a few few minutes. Uh on the project that we've been working with we've covered around 95 titles. I tried to calculate this number but to be precise I think it's closer to around 150 if we include all the prologuses, demos, marketing beats and and things that we've been covering. My day-to-day role is being the bridge between the Western publishers and the Chinese team at Huchawa Games that is operating day-to-day stuff. On a private note, I'm also a hardcore gamer who spent thousands of hours in games like

World of Warcraft, Counter Strike, and I was quite happy with Expedition 33 winning game of the year. I'm still hoping that I'm going to hear something about Knights of the Republic remake maybe at the end of this year. So about the huchawa to give you some backstory. Uh we started as a Polish company. Okay. We started as a Polish company around 2021. Our main focus was around uh bringing Polish business to the Chinese market. But after some time we focused purely on games. And as we've been growing the team was also changing. Right now around 2025 we finished the incorporation of the company in Hong Kong. all the operations or the day-to-day staff has been moved there. When it comes to the team structure, we've got four team members which are located in Europe and 11 of them in China split across different cities, Shenzhen, Beijing, also Shanghai and they are the ones who are covering day-to-day stuff when it comes to marketing, taking cover of the Chinese social media. What's important also is

every single one of us is a huge fan of games and that's also precisely verified during the recruitment. So every single one understands the games that we are working with and what's important. We're also building in-house expertise when it comes to the generals because as you're going to see in a moment we cover plenty of different generals when it comes to the uh marketing. So on the projects I guess you can recognize some of the names uh especially some of the people that also work with us here in the audience. So we've got games like Factorio X4 and Timberborn. Those are like more complicated titles with a high entry level. We've got games survival like games like S and survivals brigade uh also yet another zombie survivors god of weapons in general pretty huge and popular genre in China we are also working with playway and some of other companies from the group such as games incubator covering the simulators they're launching h and also pretty cool case with Atari which is a pretty fresh topic because uh we are working on the

remarketing of roller coaster tycoon series in China so working on both the classic one and the uh third one which recently got the Chinese localization. Now um again the data why China how is it going so in general the trend and the things that I've been noticing throughout the last few years is that China is definitely uh getting getting more and more interest I remember three four years ago it used to be treated as kind of second Germany on the steam charts market which is kind of uncharted everybody's kind of scared of acting on it nobody really knew how to get into that market but as we are seeing every year it's increasing uh as you can see here on the chart around the launch of Wukong wrong. One important thing happened is that number of users who use simplified Chinese surpass the number of users who use English on day-to-day stuff. And of course, it also includes uh players from other regions who use simplified Chinese as their main language. But we still see that players from China speaking Chinese are generally the most like the biggest

group when it comes to Steam players and not communicating with them actively technically makes us get pass around 40% of the potential player cap. when it comes to trends that we've been seeing and China is going outside there are more and more studios established more investments happening and we see accelerators getting opened in Changdu or other places we see technological parks being also opened around Shanghai which are introducing like invanting different studios to open their branches to build the teams more investments are happening Wukong Winsner meet and some other titles that you heard about was just the start because what we're going to see is definitely a surge of Chinese games coming to the And we're already seeing growth in like events. Maybe you heard about China Joy, BB Reward, more and more people coming to it. We are also talking with a lot of the publishers which are thinking about going to the events, meeting Chinese developers, making some business and it's definitely a growing interest when it comes to the player numbers and in general how it goes. Around 750 million

players growing yearbyear. majority of it around 80% is still mobile 15% PC or others with part of that reserved for like VR and console but with VR and console it's a pretty specific topic console in general is not that big if you look at the market share of PlayStation in China um again it wasn't big they're growing they're making some bold moves so it could change in the future but the price of the hardware makes kind of hard when it comes to the VR not really popular kind of similar thing as in the west when it comes to the pricing of hardware but the government is also investing in that. Um, and some of the companies also treat VR as a potential for like um, soft power or showing China through the virtual lenses. When it comes to the PC, even though it's around 15%, we still see on the Steam numbers that uh, it's the majority of the player base. Now, this is kind of the glossery of today because I'll be mentioning those platforms across different slides. Um, those three are the ones that I'm going to focus on today, but of course there

are plenty of others that I'm going to also mention, but they won't be here on this on this slide. We've got Beyb, which is the platform that we've been mainly focused around marketing. It serves as kind of the YouTube Twitch of China, which is also pretty interesting. A lot of the features that are labeled as new on YouTube, on some other Western platforms are actually, let's say, inspired by what's happening in China, such as the social media tabs or the community tabs on YouTube. Um, for example, maybe you saw some of the videos on BDB. There are a lot of like bullet subtitles popping on the screen. Those are like the players leaving the comments. We could also see possibly in the future something like this on YouTube. I know that they are kind of experimenting with things like this as of right now. Then we've got the Oh, and one thing more about BDB mainly focused around the horizontal format, but vertical is also performing pretty well. In general, it's focused around gaming, but there's also place for anime, arts, in general pop culture. Paybooks which uh could be compared to like a front end to steam. What is important with them that natively they

serve as a mobile app on which you can buy the keys directly. Um they have a pretty cool model because anytime any steam pages added it's automatically scrapped and added to the haybox interface. And because it's pretty convenient to check out new games on your phone, Chinese players can directly open the games that they want to check out. They can wish this them. What's also interesting those which discounts separately to the ones that you've got on Steam they can discuss different games there also network of curators covering those and if you've got a distribution agreement with them you can also directly sell the keys through that platform when it comes to Dwin pretty big platform owned by the same company as Tik Tok so Bidens um pretty similar to Tik Tok but also pretty more innovative when it comes to the features right now they're also testing the uh horizontal format of videos and some ads which will be also o focused around gaming. Um but again in terms of number of users, huge platform, mix of different genres, but there is also a special place for gaming out there. Uh

when it comes to some other platforms that I mentioned, so we got also Q which could be compared like a Chinese discord for running the communities by TBA which is not that big as it used to be but it could be compared like Reddit or different threads. We've got Rednote which is also growing every year. It's kind of like the Instagram. There's also maybe a place for some of the games that are cozy, have great art style. You could also consider this platform. Um, and Twitch and Waybo, which are kind of on the side of more communication, also f Waybo being Facebook of China. Now, moving on to the gray market reality and how it exactly works. I guess plenty of you already heard about the licensing, the Banana ISBN, which is pretty complicated. I won't be talking about this in a detail today. Um, but how it works is that majority of the players in China still use global steam for playing the games that they want. Why global steam and not the Chinese team? The reason is quite simple. The games that you've got on the global steam. If you want to play games like let's say Outbound or Expedition 33, you

won't find those games on the local Steam. Why? Because not that many games actually get the license. We are talking about usually 120 130 games per month. Um, this number is also increasing. more domestic games are receiving the licenses. Good examples could be Diablo for receiving the license last year and our creators receiving it last month. But the fact is not that many get games get it. Out of 120 games that receive it, only 10 are usually PC games out of which two or three are the games that are not natively Chinese. It's going to be growing every year, but at the same time, if you look at the local platforms that receive the license that have those games, we're talking about maximum couple hundred titles compared to the library of couple hundred thousand on Steam. Of course, not every game is played, but in terms of like options that players have, Steam Global is definitely more attractive as of right now. So, most of Chinese players use the Steam Global. Now the topic of the connection because officially Steam is not an official platform in China the

global version of Steam. You cannot really open it uh without using some specific tools. VPNs as we know are illegal. You cannot really use them. You cannot use them to download games. When it comes to latency while playing multiplayer games, it's a horrible experience. If anybody ever tried that, you know. So there is one specific thing which is the game accelerator. The most popular being Netis U. So how it works? Anytime a player in China wants to play a game, they use programs like Netisu to directly connect with the Steam, which gives them the option to download the games, play on a low latency. Of course, it's not perfect, but in some way gives you this option to experience the multiplayer games. And this is a commonly used tool across China. And now moving to kind of the main motive of today, which is the the gap, the communication gap uh which is kind of happening right now. Uh, I guess plenty of you heard about the review bombing or negative things coming from the Chinese market. The reason is also quite simple because as of right now,

Steam is usually the only place where the Chinese players can actually communicate through the unfortunately Steam reviews. Um, there is email is not commonly used for feedback. If when it comes to like the western social media, even if you do like a campaign where you spend 50 60,000 euro on influencers, there is a chance none of that traffic will actually affect the traffic in China. In some way, it will because of the shirt algorithm on Steam. But when it comes to social media, those videos, there's a high chance they won't make it to the BDIN or other platforms that I mentioned. So how it usually goes is that because there is no communication with the players in China, Steam page unfortunately is just the only place where they can for example give you the negative feedback or like the bugs, things that they spotted which also creates a issues in a longer run. So I kind of comparing it to the like 30% of your team that is kind of in the other room. You're not actually talking with them. There is a wall between you. You don't know what they are doing. You don't share the same workspace. And that's kind of how it's going for a lot of cases where there is no active

communication line with the Chinese players. And here is a pretty cool example of of spell brigade. Uh and if you scroll down on the Steam pages that have social media profiles, you can see that Steam actually supports the links and with custom icons to BBI Q. Recently they added by Dutya and some some other places. So if you've got those local channels, whenever there's something wrong happening with the game, there is like a transpage, scroll down, pick the page they want to go and then maybe reach out to you there. The BDB that I mentioned gives you a cool option because you can actually send a direct DM to the channel. So for an influencer players, it's actually a great place to to communicate. Same goes for like Q, which was again the kind of the Discord comparison. you can manage the communities, manage the feedback which in a long run also helps you to avoid the the ne negative feedback that I mentioned. Uh now a pretty interesting topic regarding the the market feeds and I've

got two examples which are pretty close to my heart. So the mountain blade fire and sword and KCD2 um interesting thing with those games both are set in kind of the medieval times. Um, in terms of sales with Mountain Blade, we're looking at around 30% of the estimated sales and 26% of estimated sales from KCD2. The data is also taken from Gamealytic, which is kind of the estimation, so might not be perfect. But what we can also see based on the Hbox rating, this is the one next to the Steam, is that both games have higher rating on HBOX than on Steam, which is also pretty interesting because in many cases a lot of the games that we've been also working with that we've been looking at have negative ratings on Steam like sorry on Hbox little bit more negative than on Steam. Uh so why Fen Sword is popular, right? Why why why the game is is popular? Is it because maybe Chinese love Hendrick Shinkevich or the Polish history? Not not really. It's mostly all about the story which is also similar case to KC2 where you start as a somebody without anything and you build up become like a lord in in mountain

blades or again like a noble knight in KCD2. The story was it its biggest thing when it comes to to China. Some of the players also think that those games were great when it comes like historical sightseeing because they were giving you a lot of insights about the history of of Europe. But the common assumption is that well it's a different history than like in China's different history of course than in Europe right and and if you've got a medieval game you would think that oh there is really no market fit for us there are other aspects that that players can look at right and because the market is so big there's always a niche a place where you can find a player base or somebody who would love your game um or a part of it right maybe it's not always a team it's sometimes the story the game play that's going to resonate And China definitely gives you a lot of options. So whenever you're thinking about again going to China going doing active marketing always check do like a check with again small size small sample of players. Thing that we've been doing sometimes is

we've been asking 10 15 influencers what they think about the game which also gave us some some feedback if there's really a potential in a bigger marketing campaign uh on that market. Now moving to the topic of of pricing which is uh also pretty hot topic since since few months. So I've got two comparisons that are prepared. One of them is brought out of vampire survivors. Second is in shrouded and palawward. Um starting with brought out of vampire survivors. What's interesting that both games have the same pricing in the west which is set to $5. But if you look at the pricing in China, we're talking about 22 versus 25. And when it comes to estimated percent of sales from China again brato vampire survivors there are a lot of different factors which also affected it could be the perspective 2D vampire survivors is again completely different game but they share the same genre and what's interesting is even though vampire survivors on a global scale is a bigger game is more popular in China was the

pricing the main factor we don't know right but at the same time having the difference of 31 between those two games two legendary games that you can pick up could also affect some of the uh picks that players make. Then in Shot and Palart which is also pretty interesting two games show the same price of 30 USD but if we look at the pricing in China with palart we are talking about 108 R&B which is actually based on their purchasing par power power parity and with shrouded we're talking about 98 RMBB. If you look at the conversion that the Steam is recommending the last time I checked, no 29 USD converts to around 214 RMBB, which is a crazy price in general for for game in China. And the one that palart went with makes sense. It's good. Of course, we know palart is huge because of the AP in China, but within shrouded even though they said 98, they are still competitive and they can still sell a lot of copies in China. First of all, we've got the difference of 101 which for every chain space makes a difference but also they are the under

threshold of 100 MMV which is some sort of like a psychological threshold which can also affect the sales. So when it comes to pricing in general what I would recommend you any time you're launching it always do a research check how the games that you're overlapping with competing with price because there is a chance that even by lowering two three one uh in the long run it could also make a difference. Um there are a lot of cases like this where for example Chinese players often compare to the the games that are available to the like legendary if you had a tier list legendary games with management titles we're talking about games like factorial or satisfactory those are games that legend that are legendary everybody wants to play them if you buy them you will know that you're going to have a great time uh playing those but if there is a pretender or a game that's similar and it's more expensive well why should they buy it because it's more expensive it has less content. Sure, a new game, but instead of that, I can pick up Factory and maybe some other game within that price. Um, right now

the competitor isn't really again the new game, but the games that were launched in the past on the discount and should always look at the pricing they set because even though in the west it might be the same, in China or other countries, it could be custom, which could in a long run be make a difference. Um, other interesting case could be also Valheim and Asuka because with Valheim again one of those legendary games that has been around on the market for some time we are talking about pricing of 74 RMBB and with ASCA even though again more expensive game in USD in general we're talking about 94 RMB two games which are kind of set in a similar vibe often players compare each other to them to each other and then the final argument is why should I pay like those 18 16 NMBB more if I can just get Valheim which is a legendary game and it's going to guarantee me the fun right and lowering the the price in China even by few one will make a difference because again it's a custom price you could turn it sometimes into even an interesting number such as I mean 88 or

something different the key takeaway here is just to sit down look at the games that you're overlapping with working with and pick a price that's going to suit your game because that could also be super well appreciated by Chinese players
[clears throat]
Now coming to the uh again pretty interesting topic of gameplay refunds. H the gonzo gun is a pretty again formal term. There's also another word gun which is also used for like chores by some of the Chinese players. But the common assumption which I heard many times is that whenever there is like a grinding element in the game, Chinese players absolutely love it. Well, if it's going to give us an option to kill time while traveling in a subway bus, sure. But the same thing applies here in the west. When it comes to the playing at home, not always. If you look at the general profile of Chinese player, we're talking about a male who is around 20 30 years old. Young adult who is studying, working, he's busy, doesn't have that much time to actually play games. We're talking average between one and two hours per day to spend in a game. Uh,

and if the game play is not offering you something achievable, something that you can also flex with, but it's just a repetitive task, it won't be well appreciated. And what's important with China is that there is a big cultural movement around the refunds. Because if you look at the numbers in the west, we're talking about 8 10% of average refunds. But when it comes to China, some cases between 15 to 30 or sometimes more, of course, depending on the reviews. But in general, there's this this whole approach that refund option could be used as like a demo option. So, for example, if you pick up a game on a discount, new shiny game, you don't have that that much time to to play on it. Uh you get into the game, you see that the tutorial is complicated or maybe not well described, not perfectly translated into Chinese. You know that you're going to need to spend 15, 20, 30 hours learning the game because before you're going to enjoy it, it leads to the refund. And a lot of players are used to the refund policy, swapping games, picking up new games, and that's kind of the common thing. So having the first

two hours, if you know that your first two hours in a game are strong and great, you know that there's going to be definitely again an interest from Chinese players and you might not have such a big issue with the refunds. Um, for example, throwing a gamer into the open world for like first two hours, sure, in some ways could be good, but in China, some players might get bored after those two hours and just refund the game because they're used to it and swapping those games into the new titles. Now, talking like going back to the social media topic that I mentioned. So, here we've got some of the examples from BDB. Um, let's maybe start with the screenshot that I've got on the right. So, we've got the trail of Cyberpunk. This is like um little bit older screenshot from I think 2024 but still proves the point. And we've got the same video in simplified Chinese. One of them is on the official channel of CD Project in China on BDB. Second is on the official channel of CD Project on YouTube. The one on YouTube has 5,000 views. The one in China 187,000. So

almost 40 times more. Of course, it grew over time, but in general you can see that um the visibility of that trailer on the official channel was much bigger. Train space in general not going to YouTube because there is no point in that. Having localized content published on local social media pages makes perfect sense and is great when it comes to the outreach. Uh here what you can also see is one of the channels uh we are covering for like butterscotch. So those are the guys behind the crushlands IP and also how many dudes. Uh interesting case here is that the game was really popular in China. They are from states but the first game had around 80% of traffic coming from China. And with that and with localized marketing um publishing lot of videos content we grew the channel to right now around 35,000 followers and keeps growing and right now it serves as our main asset. We switched from marketing of crashlands to the how many dudes which is also launching in a few months. Uh when it comes to again being more local as I mentioned channels give you

the option to send DMs to the influencers building up connection with them about which I'll be talking more about in a moment. But there is also another pretty cool example with X4. So this is one of those high entry levelvel games, pretty complicated, but what's interesting and that's a pretty cool story. H last year we were going there for the China Joy event having a booth and the CEO of the company is also there. And with X4, you have to know that this game is huge when it comes to the universe. Super complicated, a lot of insights, interesting stuff connected to it. And one of our marketing specialists actually got in touch with a guy who's been running by Dutba community and it was disconnected from the official marketing. The guy was just doing on his own because he loved the game so much and the universe. We established the contact with him and when the China joy was coming up, we invited him to be one of the uh people on the stand helping us to talk directly with the players. So we had uh expert from the community being a part of the

official staff on the booth which was pretty awesome. Not to mention how much he enjoyed that especially meeting the CEO of the company uh of Eaglesoft. Now some of the other examples on the organic marketing we've got first of all the timberborn which is a pretty interesting case when it comes to the organic influencer marketing I mentioned. Um overall with China it's it works completely different than to the west. You cannot really use any sort of mass emailing tools to talk with the influencers and most of the outage we are doing is personalized. We do it one by one through the uh social media platforms Wechathat and and some some other tools but it's personalized and looking at the data for Timberborn. Uh again another high entry level title what's interesting here is that throughout 2025 we've been in touch with around thousand influencers. We sent around thousand messages to u the influencers who recorded similar management more complicated titles and what's interesting 300 of them posted videos

throughout that year which means that our conversion of like message to video was on around 30% level which is pretty huge because if you compare it to the west we're talking about five six seven times more which is again huge uh with spell brigade and that's again a pretty fresh topic the game that also launched uh three weeks ago h we've been working together since September and since that time till launch that was happening the last week of April we've had around 100 videos 100 influencers posting the videos about the game what we did closer to the launch we came back to them and giving them info making sure that they are kind of in a hype train for the full launch and it resulted in 40 of them posting the videos during the 1.0 to reach lounge because of the connection we had and the bond that we built over time uh which also converted to around 500,000 organic views and this number also keeps growing because it's a pretty pretty fresh topic. So in general to kind of sum it up um

organic market influencers it's not as saturated with like different MCN's agencies agents representing uh influencers in the west because again in the west if you reach out to an influencer there's going to be always an agent. Hey guys, give me 5,000 USD if you want a video from this guy. It's not the thing um in China, right? A lot of influencers are just gamers who really want to play the games. And if you're doing a personalized outreach, talking with them directly, that's going to be super well appreciated. Now, moving to the Playway case, which is also pretty interesting with them. The case was that uh we've been working on the every game that they're launching and basically of the prologue demo, everything that's happening. Uh here on the on the slide, you can also see some of the data and info about the Rap House simulator which was a launch from last year. But uh what's interesting because we know so many influencers who covered simulation games. Anytime we look at a new game, we can always come back to them, go to the group, show them information about the

upcoming game. So we already know a network of guys who enjoy play titles. We've got the relationship. We can always come back to them with a new stuff that's coming into. So we've got technically a whole funnel prepared for just marketing of the simulation games. And having those direct plates relationships with the Chinese influencers is is huge and in the long run uh will also help you greatly. Now uh another assumption which I think was also pretty common uh throughout many few many years is that you always need a local publisher in China which also means that you cannot really stay independent if you want to go into the Chinese market. The fact is and the trend that we've been seeing um there are more and more teams also built in the studios that we work with or the others where they hire actually personal from the community or somebody from China whose goal is to simply just cover the Chinese market and we notice that this is kind of the perfect mix because the studio has an internal person which is focused around China and it also allows them to keep the independence

and doesn't need to also pass on the potential revenue. they can keep the whole control over the IP. Um, also when it comes to like the the local scenary, right? Because we've got the events, we've got the potential bin license that you might be applying with. We've got the again the China J. I mentioned having a person which will be in your team purely focused on just Chinese market is kind of the next step if you're considering going there. [snorts] uh when it comes to running operations as a kind of addition again China is too too too complicated to be focused at once and focusing on both the western and Chinese market it always needs to be separated and sure if you need the funding there a lot of publishers but if you want to keep the independence you can always go and find either somebody who's going to join your team agency partner or somebody else now coming to the uh topic of culturization uh which is um again pretty extensive topic. One of the examples that we've got here is the VT4

tank. This is kind of thing that happened in a war thunder around 2025. Uh VT4 was a Chinese tank which was added as a part of the Japanese sub tree which also was um a lot of the players in China felt disrespected because of that which created a wave of negative feedback coming at the at the war thunder around last year. So being aware of different things that you're adding, making sure double checking is always super important. Same applies to the uh dragon or long, which was again quite a hot topic around the year of the dragon two years ago. Um because if you look at um both creatures, they're a bit different. Chinese long doesn't have the wings, has a different character, represents something different than the western dragon. And always again having a dragon in the game, our western dragon doesn't mean that Chinese players will love it because that's kind of different creature, right? Being sensitive and aware of those topics is going to also help you in the long run because again you need to be aware of those things adjust them if needed. Same thing

applies to like the Chinese New Year which was happening uh recently. Um again a lot of uh Lunar New Year wishes but the fact is if we're talking to Chinese place it should always be the happy Chinese New Year not the Lunar New Year which is kind of general for the Japan, Korea and Asia. But if you're talking about China that's the Chinese New Year to be precise. Um, now two examples which are also pretty interesting from the gameplay perspective. One of them is yet yet another zombie survivors and crime scene cleaner. So we're talking about two toggles which again are pretty simple to add. Both games do not have the icebin license. RPT big in China when it comes to sales. That's a pretty small thing which helped a lot when it comes to s sales and visibility because uh for yet another zombie survivors and crime scene cleaner we've got the option to turn off or adjust the the blood in crime scene cleaner there was even an option to change it to like blue and some other colors which in general helped because China was the top one market h and

influencers on platforms like BBI or some other places were not scared of getting the shadow ban or getting their video delisted from the platform because of those things happening in the videos or like in the videos about the game. Um, again, this is not really a thing that's going to eat a lot of your development budget. So, if there are like any options to have a toggle, some addition that's going to be kind of designed as part of accessibility for China, that could also help you greatly when it comes to visibility. Uh, two examples from World of Warcraft. So, again, the game spend most of my time in gaming, I think. So, we've got the uh the snake and as you might have heard, you cannot really show any sort of bones skulls when it comes to the um Chinese version of the games. We're talking about the ISBN process. World of Warcraft has been undergoing it around 2010. H and they needed to make some changes. So, here we've got this the snake. What we can make with it? Give you a few seconds. Well, we can turn it

into a big stone with the spikes on top of it. At least they kept it, right? Um, another example could be with these monstrosity. I think it was the Scholammans. Um, that's one of the enemies that is kind of chasing us and we fight with them. What you can make it with turn it into a tall gentleman carrying loaves of breads. So those changes again they depend of course on the game what you're going with. If you want to go with the ISBN that's a completely different process. But if you want just to make some changes for the players, sometimes changing the blood or giving the options in the accessibility, options for the players to turn off some stuff could be huge. There was even a thing with I think it was the Witcher 3. There was the Witcher senses that you might remember and there was an option to turn off the fisheye effect which a lot of players actually in China mentioned in the reviews that they actually absolutely liked it because not having this option was making them feel dizzy. So even motion stuff, camera stuff could also help you when it comes to to the

market. And now coming to kind of the the end slates. So um checklist or like a summary as I mentioned with planning and strategy. Always review your game. Check your market feed. Um prepare your pricing strategy. Do the forecast as in how what you expect from this market. How it's going to be big for you. Invest in a good localization. That's a super important topic because sure we've got the tools with AI that can help to to kind of tweak it in a fast pace. Um, but being honest, we saw a lot of comments where there were like errors with AIS. Chinese players don't recommend that because they understand that you didn't really put enough effort in it. Um, so if you're considering localization, always do it in old ways for simplified and traditional. When it comes to the voice over localization, um it's not always necessary. There are games which had it like Cyberpunk or The Witcher. Some of the indies also invest in it, but it's not necessary. When it comes to Chinese localization, unless you have a game without any sort of

interface settings, complicated stuff in it. um you might need you might not need to do it but in most case if there's like a story something in it always do it because without Chinese uh again there could be also a lot of negative comments such as Mayo Jun so doesn't have Chinese which will used to be a most common review happening on China and now coming to the social media so as I mentioned get on local social media channels again I mentioned plenty of them you don't always need to have presence on the eight nine channels that are available um you can always go with one, two, three platforms, pin them to your Steam page, even have them growing in the background because even if you're not actively doing marketing, it's still pinned to the Steam page and players can see it. In terms of assets, adapt them to Chinese, add the fonts. Um, doesn't need to be too complicated, but always have them localized into Chinese. I'm talking about the Steam page. If you've got the title, you can try to localize into Chinese. That's going to be also well appreciated. Adapt your capsule,

add those Chinese fonts. Again, it's not a thing that's going to have a direct ROI, but in a long run will be also well appreciated by the players and start talking with the community. Then the last step, which is again getting in touch with the local influencers, getting to local events. Even if you're not planning to have a huge booth, I would always recommend you to go to China, check out China Joy, which is again kind of the actual Gamescom Asia in some way when it comes to traffic. Um, absolutely worth experiencing that and checking how the things are going there. When it comes to the end results, always adapt them, change them. China isn't a market which is a sprint. It's something that you need to go nurture over time. It's a long run, especially with the social media assets that it's going to take you definitely for some some time to to build up. So, I think we ended kind of in a shorter way, but thank you all for today's speech. Uh, it was great having you here. If you've got any questions around for the next two days, um, and yeah, good luck on your journeys across China.

So if you have any questions now I can pass you the microphone.
Yes, thank you for the lecture. Uh I have a question about the influencers in China. Have you worked with MCN in China? Um in most cases there has been couple campaigns where we've been working with MCN's because again there are still some influencers which are under the agreement or not exclude like are exclusive to the MCN's but in most cases we focus on organic whenever there's like a big launch especially for like double A titles we usually also find like some sponsored paid influencers but in many cases they're not part of MCN's.
Okay. But how can you tell if they're part of MC or not? Usually when we write to them, it's not the influencer replying to us. It's just the MCN.
Okay. MCN's multi- channelannel network basically like agencies for influencers in China.

Yes. Which is affiliating like influencers have them signed under exclusivity. Uh so if you want to do any sort of video promotion with them, it needs to always go through that MCN. They put their like fees on top of it. So yeah.
Thank you. Thank you.
Oh, any more questions? No. Oh,
when it comes to pricing, you mentioned we have to check other uh games, but uh is there any place that we could look it up because how how can be how how can we be sure that they did the good job? Uh so when it comes to the pricing, I think the best place to check it would be Steam DB. That's how usually you always go through it because it's quite simple to navigate. You can always pick the main currency you want to look at. So let's say you set it to USD. Then you've got the layout for like all of the different currencies. So for example,

Chinese yuan. You can see similarly as my like presentation. You can see the exact number um with what they did in China. Then you can also look at some other sources. I mentioned game analytic. They're pretty good when it comes to estimations. I think their algorithm is based on the number of reviews coming from China. Based on that, you can see how many copies they sold, right? Or what you could also technically do is go to the social media to the Heybooks pages. Even if you don't speak Chinese, you could translate some of the stuff with Google Translator and see if there are any comments about the the pricing that it's too expensive. Uh, in general, Chinese players are honest about it when the price is too high. Uh, I would say kind of the sweet spot that we've been seeing is that for indie titles, between 20 to 81 is like a fair price. Anything above that is kind of again bringing questions and requests to lower it. Thank you.

So anymore? Okay. So thank you very much for your lecture. Thank you.