Mobile Gaming in the Arabic Speaking Market

[Music] hello everyone this is a continuation to parishes presentation but I will like dive a little bit more into different type of details about the Arabic market so tomaten is a mobile games publisher for the Arabic speaking market we are focusing on culturally relevant mobile games usually mid core to hard core and with cards as well like the focus right now so the mahtim since the beginning it has around 70 million downloads for its games we have published 45 games and

most of these games have reached the top of the charts across the region targeting the Arabic market and why this hype about the Middle East and the Arabic market Arabic is the fourth most spoken language worldwide but maybe less than 1% of all content available online is available in Arabic and this is a big market this is like more than two billion dollars market with maybe 400 million Arabic speakers but the most important thing about the Arabic market is countries like Saudi Arabia Qatar Kuwait Bahrain have the highest average revenue per paying user in the entire world we are talking about like maybe 8 times higher than China 3 times higher and in the US market and the market is this is like the fastest growing market also definitely an interesting market

for people to start getting into it's still cheap to acquire users and the payout from these users and in-app purchases are very very high some information about the Arabic users so most of the people will stick to one or two games if they are playing a mid core to a hardcore game they are very attached to the culture and language and you might see a lot of people like open-minded they are traveling and going but once they start playing games they will be very attracted to the culture back again and they love to play games in their original language despite people think that no they will play them in English if they find them in Arabic they will enjoy them much more countries like Saudi Arabia as I said to have the highest RPP you in the world and 75% of the population are active online this is

the most one of the most profitable countries in the world and this is the second most profitable after Turkey but if you put it like as this is like a population but per capita it's much much much higher and 25% of the people will spend 1 to 4 hours playing mobile games every day the male users in Saudi Arabia I am it the focus is in Saudi because this is the biggest market they spend a lot of time online every day playing games and 80% of them are mobile gamers 85% are very young 25 to 34 years old and they spend $50 to $100 per month and they want this is the most important thing is that they want social interaction so if you give people social interaction chat forums ability to

communicate to each other you will have a winning game in the Arabic market on the other hand they are the highest spenders in the world on games and of games as well shopping as well like they they will spend a lot of money and many many of them are gamers they enjoy playing games and majority of females living in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf rich countries they don't work and they have a lot of maids at home at the same time so they have a lot of time to play games on the phone and do shopping online and they spent money on games every month and they spend less than main users but in majority they will spend a lot of money on games the top grossing games in the region vary between SLG

games being the top performing games and you will see card games sport games like football games in general and RPG games are the most successful if you look at the top 20 or top 30 charts in the Middle East these are dominant and on the top free charts as usual you will find the casual games the hyper casual games and sometimes card and board games you will find them topping the free-to-play games the majority of the market is definitely free-to-play and less and less games are becoming popular to be paid also in app purchases make 80 percent of the revenue in the region and this is a very big challenge for indie developers who are developing games like hyper casual games or casual games in general that are dependent on ads that they want to successfully publish in the

Arabic market because they pay out for ads and the region is very very very small so most of the people will not make any any in the past we have launched games with hundreds of millions of impressions on ads but you will make very little money from ads so the focus is on an app purchases only this will become very successful also the majority of the market is Android but the majority of the money comes from iOS so you can flip these results for monetization the biggest problem for the users is trying to enter the market so you will find it very challenging because and the opportunity is big because Arabic as I said is a big language a lot of users but there is no content available for them and at the same time the challenge the biggest challenge for the developers is on how to get to the market

so the Arabic language is a very complex language it is written from right to left which means that when you want to implement Arabic inside the game everything has to be flipped and this you will find a lot of challenge in coding to do that also the cultural sensitivity on how to exactly put the right things to be politically correct when you say things in Arabic but also who will do the support who do the community management are there certain things that you can do to do the monetization correctly or do you do it as in the global and you will find that the Arabic market is very unique with the things that you will need to do for to become successful this is why we do a publishing model for these companies we help a lot of companies around the world get into the Arabic market by providing them with all the services related to

getting into the market so the process goes from localization making sure that the language is correct the art is correct and then we help the developers with the monetization implement certain features inside the game that will attract people to pay so these show off elements these like social ideas that people love inside the games that will make them pay inside the game then you will do all the marketing the creatives which social networks to use which influencers to use minimizing the coast for the CPI and maximizing the ROI for the game that you are making and definitely the support and community management for the game the translation of the text is very different than let me say the localization or culturalization of text is very different than just pure translation so making sure that the Arabic is correct

not like a Google Translate so it will be disaster the UI direction of text everything has to be right to learn and then you will do the story and the graphics to adopt them but if you do all of these things then you are like very much destined to succeed and the reason behind that as I said there is no content in Arabic so when you put a little bit of extra effort and you launch the game then most probably you have like a very good chance of succeeding rather than launching a game in English without putting any effort on to that definitely like App Store optimization plays a big role into making this game successful these are small challenges a lot of developers face is when they want to localize things in Arabic and they will put it on Google Translate or any other service then you will find that the text will be broken down into characters and this is

not how Arabic is written and you will find a lot of ads on Facebook and Instagram and like the text is like all like messed up people will immediately recognize that this is a low-quality localization and they will not download the game and you would just like pay money the money would go to waste these are also examples of people trying to localize games into Arabic this is an extreme and this is like also another extreme so you cannot like go like this and also don't like whale women like crazy because this also does not represent people in the region maybe this is something more realistic but we have seen like just like small changes but will give a better effect rather than going going full force into making a lot of changes marketing is is very crucial in to making the game successful knowing which social network so in the

region you will find that Facebook is very dominant snapchat also is very very very strong in Saudi Arabia Twitter you will see that Saudi Arabia is the number one country in the world in the consumption of YouTube videos per capita it is also the number one country in the world and the usage of Twitter for utilizing this platform to advertise for the game is very important also you can focus on influencer marketing so finding the influencers so a simple influencer campaign with someone who has a couple of million of followers will bring you more results and a $10,000 campaign on Facebook or other social media also we have built our own influence or networks we have in the company anthem anthem we have signed

the exclusive deals with influencers to advertise for companies in the region and they have millions and millions of followers voiceovers and music inside the game can add an extra touch to the game to make people believe that these games are successful localized speak the same language as them people will appreciate that a lot something interesting that we have seen that we never seen anywhere else in the world is having 24/7 support for the games especially for hardcore games strategy games and this type of games if you are attracting someone who will end up paying you a hundred thousand dollars per month then it's really worth having someone dedicated to answer their questions 24/7 it's like a personal concierge service for these top whales so you are not dealing with a traditional market you are dealing with a market of VIPs and

these VIPs want to be treated differently and if you give them that then you will see like an open credit card for you which is brilliant these are like some case studies of games that we have launched globally this was like a game that was never known in the Arabic market just small organization for that and it shot to the first spots and the free app store these are like more racing games drifting games making like small changes to these games instead of having a Lamborghini which is like we are all used to in racing games you are starting to write the pickup which is something very popular go people go race in these and the deserts in Saudi Arabia that made that sort of localization made all the difference for these players also we have maybe launched 40 different games and every single title that we have launched has reached the top of the

charts across the region this is like our most successful game this is a card game very local you will see like some of the changes that we have made to that game we change the female character to a male character which represents the audience that we are after middle-aged men from 24 to 40 years old with like the traditional clothes and like focusing a lot on the world VIP because this is what they want and this is how they would like to be represented so just like making small changes will make all all the difference so we have launched successful RPG games from China from Korea all of them will follow the same techniques on how to launch this game successfully even like airport city from a game and so it was launched

successfully in Arabic we are launching soon a couple of very interesting titles from Korea and from a game called Hollywood story from nan a bit and the region and looking to find like more successful games worldwide to be launched successfully in the Arabic market we've nominated for a couple of awards this year and by Pocket Gamer and thank you so much I hope that you enjoyed this and I hope if you need anything from us let me know thank you so much appreciated [Applause] you [Music]