SEA Game Market Insights and How Not to Waste Your Precious Marketing Dollar

[Music] nice to meet you guys everybody my name is Johnson from eight viral today we're talking about the Southeast Asia market insights I'm gonna go deep into numbers revenue potential how much money should be spending marketing as well as how to not spend your money wrongly okay so before we get into it then I go back it's it's fine so anyway before I get into the presentation proper I'm gonna talk a little bit about what I do so I've been in gaming this shree for about eight and a half years I used to do development publishing and now focusing

on marketing and media inmate Farrell our main businesses are actually influenced to marketing with 1,500 influences in Southeast Asia and the commands about 850 million followers on top of that we also have a hard coke in media in Thailand as well as in Indonesia okay can you hear me okay great so and in Thailand we have one of the top three game media's but specialising mostly in hardcore games okay and for influencer marketing we focus mostly on entertainment videos live streaming videos let's play videos as well as social media shoutouts and for for game fever we're focusing a lot on editorial content that means news reviews trailers so you guys got some new games launching in Southeast Asia please let us know we also do specialized game video content as well as our new products which is our game databases but we focus a lot of raw data a lot of game guides for very hardcore games like overhead for example which is

a Nexen title and also next thing we're planning to do a game show in Bangkok where we be having a b2c b2b and eSports and these are some of the companies that we work with I'm pretty sure you know some of them yeah okay presentation profits let's talk about Southeast Asian gaming market again a little disclaimer this is just a fraction of what you really need to know before entering Southeast Asia but I'm gonna try and educate you guys about as much as I know in the shortest possible time so in the Southeast Asia gaming market based on the latest news your report is about 3.3 billion dollars news reports sometimes a little bit over exaggerated so it's probably around 2.5 billion but for the sake of discussion we'll be using three point three in this presentation on top of that Southeast Asia is actually the fastest growing game market with about 29.1% yo and year growth and so if Southeast Asia is 30 basically 3.3 billion dollars how

this money distributed across the different countries now this is basically a kind of distribution metric that we have collected by talking with the previous publishes throughout Southeast Asia across the different countries and so Thailand is the number one gaming market in Southeast Asia followed by Vietnam and Indonesia and it's an AFOL says so on and of course with a assume continued growth rate about twenty nine point one percent the market should hit about five point five billion dollars in by 2022 and so if we were to analyze the different game genres across Southeast Asian countries we basically taken a look at five different countries this is a snapshot taken on the 12th of July which is last Friday I'm not mentioning Vietnam in this metric simply because Viet Nam's game market 80% of the monetization actually happens outside the App Store and Google Play that means that whatever ranks you see is actually quite inaccurate so if you look across the metric here you notice that there's

actually some genres that stand out really really strongly so for example if we talk at look at the top game genres by country meaning the number of appearances of game genres across the top 20 ranks you notice that strategy and MMORPG stands out really well in particular let's say for example Thailand out of the top 20 grossing games seven of them are actually MMORPGs if you look across the region meaning counting the number of game genres appearances it across five countries you notice that MMORPGs and ciencia which is basically chinese MMORPGs actually appear 22 times followed by strategy games and mobile and so on if you look at the top five grossing genres you will see a lot of red and orange because the MOBAs and the battle royale games tend to be generating a significant amount of revenue much more than everybody else and if you look at it there'll be six appearances of battle royale and six appearances of MOBA

followed by MMORPG strategy and court battle so the metrics is kind of different if you look at it in a sense if you have animo became or a battle royale game you tend to make a lot more money but if you have a say an MMO RP battle game you have a higher chance of entering the top 20 so it's kind of a different metric to consider moving ahead if we were to look at the analysis of by genre and by rank in MSA rank I mean top grossing ranks the top grossing better or yell in this case is Karina's free-fire the top mobile will be mobile legends bang bang and of course top strategy rights of Kingman's lost you see top MMORPG ranking rock em and of course top casino singers against poker okay now you know the ranks I've shared with you now how much money do you expect to make in Southeast Asia now there is no official metric for this this is basically what I got from independent studies by talking to various publishers in the region and so

if and of course again it really depends on your game but and depends on the time of the year but on average the top places top ranked in Thailand Indonesia and Vietnam should be netting you about five to ten million USD per month followed by you know the top 5 and top 20 and top 50 so countries like a very small countries like Singapore for example you should be hitting about 500,000 to 1 million dollars I'll let you guys take a few photos ok so next part would be how not to waste your precious marketing dollar every I mean many of you guys I'm sure you guys are super rich and do a lot of millions of those marketing but it's important to know how much to spend depending on the games that you have in a jean ray of games that you are publishing so in this case what I'm showing here again disclaimer would be our recommendation from the game launches that we've done in Southeast Asia over the past years and so you know please consider that fact ok so we estimate about 25% of that

total revenue that you generate in Southeast Asia is actually reinvested into marketing so we base it on new zoo stats of 3.3 billion dollars that's about 800 million dollars and most of the time publishes spending spent it pretty wildly so the two main questions that we receive from our clients and our partners is this how much should I spend in the first month of marketing for my game launch and secondly how should i distribute my budget because I mean am i spending too much in Thailand should I spend more in Indonesia and most companies actually target region wide so they don't exact exactly just target a single country and that makes it kind of complicated to decide okay the short answer it really depends at the long answer comes in four parts I'm going to go into it firstly I believe that you should be categorizing your game into two different metrics the first what is the genre of the game if

the genre of the game is not a money-making genre for the Southeast Asian in the market you pretty much should be spending less money and also you should consider the class of your game is it a triple game or is it an indie single a game if it's not in between if it's not those two ends of the spectrum it was in between things it basically is a double of a game now in general if you have a mobile game I don't recommend you to launch it itself is Asia because Karina's ROV as well as mobile Legends moon town small Legends is pretty much killing it in Southeast Asia the chance of success in Southeast Asia if you launch a mobile is pretty much close to zero but if you have MMORPG there are lots of MMORPGs launching in Southeast Asia this year the marketing spend you should be spending is around three to five million dollars in the first month across six countries and of course depending on the class of the game it should be spending less I don't recommend use to spend more than you know what is displayed here because you probably will make the money back you know and the list goes on for

court battle of a strategy and battle royale next how should you split your marketing mix okay we have done like full scale service for marketing for game companies like say Nettie's NEX and etc and really analyze in terms of like the CPI numbers in terms of like the influence that cost in each country the amount of views that you get from the influencer marketing as well as out of home marketing like billboards TVs and train stations trains as well as TVC marketing now this is what we generally recommend if you have a triple-a MMORPG so for digital marketing which again meet viral we don't do digital marketing but in general if you're looking at about a hundred thousand users per country in Southeast Asia this is the amount that you should be spending about 1.3 million dollars for influencer marketing considering the cost of influences in each country this is the

metric as I've seen here and it's about four hundred and twenty thousand dollars distributed across six countries and four out of home marketing you should be spending about 1.4 million dollars of course Singapore has the most expensive kind of marketing so you'll be spending a lot more but this is the recommended amount so generally you'll be spending a minimum of three million dollars across six countries you're spending less you probably won't make that much you spend too much you will start to lose money so that's just a general recommendation here okay PR now in Southeast Asia depending on the country's certain game media are stronger and seven game media's are weaker so in general you should only be spending about twenty thousand dollars we recommend you'll be spending it on pre-registration phase which is CBT phase for about ten thousand across six countries and of course you ging launch you should be basically spend about ten thousand so twenty thousand or so on top of that what happens to the marketing after the first month now if we're talking about MMORPGs a lot of the

companies from China and Korea actually overspend after the first month of marketing now why would you do like big splash market because you want to establish a brand when you have a strong brand power with your game your CP is are generally much lower any kind of user acquisition efforts will be much lower and also your monetization will be higher because if I trust the game I will spend money but the thing is if you overspend after the first month you basically are increasing more expense on to your P&L then and not be able to make a reasonable profit so in general we recommend on it as a benchmark to spend about twenty to thirty percent off the revenue you generate in the first month back into marketing therefore being able to sustain your user base and of course continue the last lifespan of your game for digital marketing after the first month we strongly recommend that you don't go crazy just spend enough to increase your da you slowly every day

but once the CPI prices go to high you really got to cut back on that for influencer marketing okay here's the thing when a game first launches we don't recommend that you do any live streaming activities because if your game has any bugs in it you will be basically pretty public and there's no way you can cover it up because it's life so in the first month focus on youtuber videos focus on video uploads social media shoutouts to basically get users interested once you have a community of users that's when you start doing live streaming to basically use influences as a form of community management after that for all h and TVC marketing after the big splash marketing the big branding we only recommend that you do o H and T BC during local holidays special events game anniversaries as well as major game updates and for final tips basically you gotta localize your game if you don't localize your game you won't make money nobody understands your game and

majority of Southeast Asian people don't understand English so in Thailand you gotta do Thai Vietnamese you go to Vietnam I go to Vietnamese Indonesia go to bahasa indonesia and for Singapore Malaysia in the Philippines you can get away of English you don't have to do bahasa melayu and you don't have to do Tagalog they understand English so it's okay moving ahead for digital marketing once the CPI prices get too crazy you gotta switch gears so try influencer marketing try out-of-home marketing etc and also when you are planning your budget for marketing you really got to consider the performance of your game outside of Southeast Asia first often game companies launch the games in China in Korea and Japan in the u.s. first monitor your traffic monitor your performance if it's doing well you have a good chance of launching in Southeast Asia but if it doesn't do well in China or Korea it probably won't do well in Southeast Asia either on top of that you gotta consider the brand marketing as well simply because again as I mentioned

before if you have strong branding your general CPI prices can drop up to five times compared to your typical facebook costs simply because people are more willing to go download when they've seen an influencer make a video about it I've seen a big ad about it and also you'll be monetizing better yeah and if you have a double-a or triple-a game don't spend too much money you're not gonna make money back lastly very very important and most important point Southeast Asia is not like China Japan Korea or the u.s. it really is quite different we are a region we are not a single country there are multiple languages there are different cultural perspectives and you gotta take that in consideration so whatever works in other countries might not work well in Southeast Asia so you have to take a local perspective when you're planning your marketing and that's it yep thank you actually go back

a slight this is really impossible yep anyway yeah if you have any questions I'll be happy to answer them definitely not in fact we've actually seen many game launches in just English or just Chinese so if you are doing only Chinese you could be targeting the Malaysian Chinese which is the highest ARPU population in Malaysia but if you're targeting English to Chinese users can use it to the Malay users can use it too so localization and Malaysia hasn't made a very big impact on some of the publishers so we work with I mean

this is really just our feedback from our publishers so different games different results hi some economic forecasts predict Indonesia will be the fifth most important country for a economy in general yes in the future will atoll or will it also reflect in gaming do you think so I mean any country that's a huge population has a huge potential for market growth I mean the previous speaker was just talking about the Indian market so Indonesia has by far the largest population in Southeast Asia with 270 million people the only problem with Indonesia right now is that the users are so dispersed you pretty much have like a thousand or two thousand islands in Southeast Asia in Indonesia alone right but most of the

monetization is still happening in Jakarta and the neighboring cities and that means that pretty much if you're doing like splash marketing you won't be hitting the right kind of users in fact we recommend very focused marketing in Jakarta and the greater Jakarta region but eventually what I'm trying to say is the market will grow and there's a good chance that Indonesia might take over as the number one highest grossing country in Southeast Asia because of the sheer number of people that they have [Music]