NetEase on how to break into the Chinese mobile market

[Music] sh niow uh good afternoon Pocket Gamer my name is Christina and I'm the mobile business development manager for nety so for those of you who don't know who nety is don't worry not a lot of people here in the west do um but hopefully we're going to be one of the biggest markets in the west soon as well so before I get into to my presentation I have a funny little story about my first time in China so I've been at netes for about a year but about a month ago was my first time in China I was there for two weeks and I knew it was going to be somewhat of a culture shock but it really was for sure I went to hongo which is a small little town of 10 million people and I it was crazy experience but I have a point to this at the end so one day my colleagues a couple 12 people on our

team or so my colleague said you know what we're going to we're going to really immerse you in the culture today this is what we're going KTV how does that sound I'm like oh no that's karaoke this very scary in the I told him in the west you know you do karaoke you're probably drunk at a dive bar and somebody some Frat Boys are singing Sweet Caroline in the back so they didn't understand and they're like it'll be fine it'll be fine so we get out of the cab and I swear it was Vegas huge place you walk in people are bowing at me welcome welcome the loud music everywhere and I'm like okay we're not in Kansas anymore let's let's see how this goes so we get into the room the door closes and the rest is history I made it out alive there was beer involved but this is just a show that China is such a you know you never really know what it's like until you actually go there and same is true with with games you really need to have feet on the ground there to understand what it's like just something simple as

karaoke really gets you into the immer in the culture and you have to go from there so here we go so a little bit about netes since a lot of people don't really know what netes is little background we are a very large Chinese publisher and developer of mobile games we started in 1997 uh but we we don't only do mobile games and PC games we started out first as a internet technology company with an email service provider called 163.com has 800 million subscribers I still can't fathom that but so you also have advertising Services um a huge news portal we get a lot of Chinese people get their news from um we have a music portal as well and e-commerce site called kala so we are very big but games make up most of what we do um we also have a San Francisco office which we just opened about a year and a half ago and they're focused on bringing our internal titles from China to the west

to really help our Global presence and our brand so there we go so this is what we do best games mobile and PC so our flagship mobile title is called fantasy Westward Journey which is based off of an IP that we had for a called Journey to the West which was one of our biggest and still one of our biggest PC games so that was ported over to to mobile about a year and a half ago and together with Westward Journey online the two have taken the top two spots on the iOS grossing charts since they have were released a year and a half ago and constantly they're up there and usually we have five or three or so games up in the top 10 so we are very excited there um we also run all of Blizzard's titles in China it's May maybe how you know us um including Hearthstone on mobile so that's huge huge partnership for us and definitely the latest Warcraft movie was bigger in China so uh we also LIC IP

into China which is evident by our relationships with Kung Fu Panda and others and I'm sure you heard about our relationship now with Minecraft very exciting and we are a launch partner with Google Daydream to bring two VR titles to their platform and we go so now to why we're all here um what is the state of the Chinese market and how to to Western developers and Publishers break into it so it's no secret that China is huge Market um it's one of the reasons why developers and Publishers really want to break in and obviously the lore of it is the huge population and the amount of users that that companies can get um there's a huge huge infl influx of mobile games because smartphones have just taken over the market and everybody from from other platforms are starting to move over especially the PC World and uh where it was the dominant plator for a long time we now are seeing that P or

mobile is moving up so traditional G PC gamers are migrating platforms and I did not format this well enough um yes just basically shows that mobile games are starting to come up and a lot of companies like ourselves are most of what we're doing are uh mobile so this is top games released in China not top games or genres that are downloaded so last year we started to see a lot more RPGs and strategy and MMO games instead of as casual are still very big in China but right now this is big because of all the PC Gamers that have started to move to Mobile so RPG is definitely the dominant platform or genre and that's what we use some some of our biggest games as well so RPGs and MMOs usually have less players than casual games casual games have the biggest user base in China but the money is starting to come from these games with all the users have experience

in hardcore PC Mobile is makes the most money uh so yeah and they also have a longer life cycle and a lot of Chinese Gamers eat content just so much faster than here in the west so you really have to be on top of that constantly developing and people stay in your game for a long time therefore will spend money so with the size of the market does come a lot of competition um that said most of the revenue in the Chinese market is contained within the top 10 games produced by only a few major Publishers and players the market is still growing though but the top 10 grossing games in the country take up more than half of the revenue so it shows how difficult it is to get in and to sustain success so most of the games on the App Stores as well are from local players so very few games have had traction that are non-chinese games but there are a few that have gone come in from the west but as if you look at the

top top charts most of them are probably in Chinese and you don't know what they are um but that's just shows how crazy it is so one big thing here in the west we rely heavily on our relationships with Apple and Google mainly because there's only two Apple and Google and those are already hard enough to maintain relationships with but the same cannot be said about China so of course there's the IOS app store Apple's there the to help there's also a ton of jailbroken devices and then app stores that that go with that but if you have a game on Android be don't be scared but we wear there are literally hundreds hundreds of app stores and they all run a different way so you have to be be prepared to go in and you know you could pick and choose but it's going to be hard you might have to optim optimize your game for for each one and definitely your your marketing marketing channels for that um Google is also not allowed in China so they're not there to to help you um and without being a little

handheld there you might run the risk of being kicked off the app stores if you don't pay attention to what all these other stores needs are so that's a big thing to consider hundreds of app stores but Android is still the dominant platform iOS is moving up not quite well maybe up to 50/50 or so but it just Android is very hard so distribution will be expensive in China Apple takes standard 30% cut around the world but on Android they may take up to 30 or to 60% I know it sounds crazy but there's just so much competition and they're hungry for Content so if they want you they want you but just beware and when you use an Android distributor uh in exchange for marketing and the promotion and all that they do featuring um it could be pretty difficult element to navigate especially if you don't have somebody on the ground or that or if you don't speak Chinese

and I don't speak Chinese so that would be tough uh so but however if you have a partner these Cuts might be less um they a lot of the bigger Partners have their own marketing channels distribution channels and they could do it for you so that is one thing to consider we're going to circle back to that but very expensive so and marketing is also very different in China for example they put up a billboard in a mall 100 million will see it and it's that's just how they market so depending on how you want to approach things uh there are a few different options what you want to do so do you want to how do you want to do in the territory do you just want to throw up your game and just see how it does you may already have success in the west but the same canot then China might be the Last Frontier do you want to be top 100 50 even 10 or or do you really want

to compete head on with the local players so here you have to decide what you want but here are the key things to consider there's obviously more but these are what we think are important so you could be better um oh on the move you could be better um create something with all the elements a Chinese gamer would like seek in Chinese investment um start early take your time and get Fe in the territory it's really important to have somebody on your team that's there to really understand what users like Trends and just to understand the market and you're there to talk with all the dist Distributors and marketing channels and everything so you really just understanding the gamer is very important they are different than they are here in the west um for one mobile consumption habits differ people spend much more time in game they play longer sessions and it's some some point people

are playing for up to 6 hours a day in game so you have to be aware of that and and how your your development cycle is a lot of people take cabs in China they're on buses trains they're commuting all the time so having a mobile device is really important and they're spending a lot of that time in game okay you could be modest you could commit to the territory you know stick to your artistic vision and throw the game up on the App Store but don't really expect much of the market you may just have have Global launch success in some places some geographies around the world but you don't want to pour too many resources into China and you definitely have to pay attention to China or you could be surprising so bring something to China that nobody's ever seen before it's definitely a lot easier said than done but there are a few examples of when this worked of West to to East so these are a couple examples the art style seen in limbo and Monument Valley are not really something that a mass

Chinese audience would usually go for um especially not as premium game but the art and the gameplay is still so unique that they had relative success without having a major form of localization or culturalization so that it's really important that they were still very successful uh so yeah moving on so these are things that you're going to need to have in your game if you want to really compete head on with all the other players really have to pay attention build the game I wouldn't say from from if you build it it from the ground up for the Chinese market great but if you already have one these are the things you have to consider to change to go to China so suitable art that's the first thing that Gamers look for in a game it's going to be you have to have the right art for the market and it is sometimes very different than it is here so one of the examp couple of the examples of art styles and China are a cute kind of stylized form of the G form of character maybe a 3 to1 or 4 to1 ra body

proportions you see the big cute heads and all of that and that's a suitable art style for for any genre really you can see it in casual games and more hardcore games for sure and at netes we have we have both or you could do more along the lines of the realistic art um this is more for hardcore games MMOs args and suited for a more core audience and definitely not something to have for for casual games it's just not going to work with those players um even colors are important so for example red here in the west we think is an aggressive color it's color of a stop sign and we don't really put that too much out but in China it's a happy color people use it for weddings the color of their wedding dresses events holidays and all of that and on the flip side white in China is used for funerals so you really have to make sure you understand something as little as a color really really makes makes sense um

lastly removing sensitive culture differences uh political religious any of these elements in your game really should be taken out because they could be potentially banned by the government or just make some users uncomfortable because that's not really why they're there to play games next freeo play so free to play here you know by download games free play for a little while you you delete it maybe spend a buck or two China it is the end all fre to play is so important in China and it's so way more complex having in gain a big robust in-game economies um everybody thinks of China as the pay to win place and it really is pay to win people spend more money on different things like VIP packs upgrades skins different weapons expensive weapons just to be the top of the leaderboards and make their friends be better than their friends so they they also have the patients to grind more and then they'll spend to rise up

to the top of the leader boards so social element of your game this is absolutely vital to success in China being social so Chinese users get a lot of their news from Chinese media portals and they're not really used they don't really know what's popular in the west so they may not know if we have a huge game that's going viral here they would have no idea so they're not going to get they're not going to download it because it's big here so also social networks aren't just Facebook and Twitter mostly because they're not allowed so you're going to have to get understanding of WeChat easy chat and weebo instead and they're all different they have social they're just very social and you really have to get into to use them um even having something as easy as a QR code for your game will help with the number of downloads that it gets for just little things like that so Gamers also share a lot on social media so they're going to share their gameplay

they're going to share their experiences with all their friends and that's how people find new games to play and that's super important Word of Mouth means something a lot different in China because there's so many more people and your game become a could become a viral hit just from a easy chat post so and virtual status and the Art of showing off also not something that's negative like it is here so they there needs to be a drive for play players to really go in game and spend to be better than their friends so lastly the control schemes are a little different in China here we like to fight ourselves really get into a game it could have come from our love of console games where in China they didn't really have that button press and and fight but in China they prefer autoplay easy controls mostly because they're in and out of commuting and just around town and playing games at work and walking and they prefer that and Status building over dexterity really so

that is a big thing to keep in mind um so it's not as easy as translating your text anymore got to go in deeper than that design your game to fit the market themes Like Comics uh classic novels martial arts uh those are all things that China has in games there's over 300 games to the three kingdom story as it is so really have to find out what they like or you could use a new approach like Esports um definitely social maybe an IP that works in China um hard to do both like get a game an IP that works in China but you never know try it out um or multiscreen Multi-Device things like that got got to get into that so getting your feet on the ground or partner will really allow you to understand the pop culture Trends and which is important to an accurate localization really also decide on which demographic you're targeting uh most of the users are aged 6 16 to 30 or so so you really have to

get into that and how they play how much content that they consuming and what is popular in the market right now so this all comes down to one thing find a partner find a partner find a partner uh partner can help financially but also with the legal aspects of China um they could advise on all the elements that I've talked about from the art to the gameplay how to make a really intense in-game economy freeto play and all of that even just looking at the UI of Chinese games are very busy but they consider that a challenge and it's that's just what it is here you know we like our games very simple we don't want things hanging out on the sides of the UI but differences are differences so and then large content providers such as nettis and the big players they they know what is popular in China and most of their games they can pump out really quickly and and get more users so and last thing on an Android

Channel sometimes games are ripped off or cloned and having a partner could really help with with all those issues so this might be a little more necessary now there's been a change in some of the Chinese regulations around publishing and how Western developers and Publishers work with Chinese companies so it might really be necessary to have a partner now because they'll know what'll be approved some since some we think that most games might have to go through government audit process but I tomorrow July 1st we should hear more and until then we then we'll be able to comment on really what it's like to to find get into China and bring a game there so when you look for a partner remember a few things remember it is a partnership be flexible um commit to the territory but start early so that you can really build your game for the region you might need to make some big changes uh regarding art and everything so no it is partnership and if you want

to get there you really have to commit to it you can't just say this is my game this is how I'm going to keep it and go you can but you may not have the success that others do so thank you that is [Music] [Applause] [Music] it