Superstar Session: Targeted Approaches to the Casual Game Market in China

we do actually have one more talk and that will be our keynote uh keno our superstar session from youfan from ohio our sponsors uh of the art of publishing track talking about targeted approaches to the casual game market in china you finally work in sofia they're all working uh thank you chris youfan how uh how are you good i um i know i'm sorry for causing all this trouble and i just can't believe that we have to go to the last resort you know even in the you know in 2021 and i'm using a photo dialing well it seems to be working fine now obviously the only thing i'll say is obviously you've got chris changing the slide so if you just let chris know when you want to change a slide and he will uh flick it over to the next one and in the meantime i'll remind everyone if you've got any questions throw them into the q a and um i'll be back at the end and we'll go through any questions and answers that we've got you found

perfect perfect thank you katie and thank you um so apologize again that you guys are not going to be able to see me and we have to do the presentation over phone um so hi everyone here this is ifan from ohio and we are a casual game publisher in china and it's a great honor to be invited by pocketgamer to present here today as a guest speaker i'm very glad to have the opportunity to share some thoughts and insights around publishing casual games in china from the perspective of a local publisher it is undeniable that you know casual market is highly active and it is a gyra with great potential that accounted for roughly 78 of the total game downloads worldwide and when it comes to china i would like to let everybody be aware that uh the opportunity is also massive and it's welcomed by gamers from all ages so here i'm going to show you some

figures to give you all an overall picture of how exciting this market is so according to a local market research firm's analysis um the monthly active users of casual gains in china have surpassed 400 million in january 2020 and our own internal research jointly conducted with ocean engine showing that you know around 200 million of people are playing casual games on a daily basis in 2020 which generated about over 5 billion in revenue 5 billion dollars in revenue both from iaps and in-app ads we expect this figure to continue to grow towards the end of the year to record 7 billion so the market itself is pretty exciting um so the market size is not the only thing that is promising other than that we also observe that the gamers preference is gradually turning towards casual

games while the mobile download in china have enjoyed a significant growth significant growth over the past year the growth in casual game is even more significant the total downloads have increased from 360 million in 2019 to almost 530 million in 2020 uh recording the year over year growth of 46. uh 46 compared to the general mobile games 27 percent and also amount the top 1000 most downloaded games the proportion of casual game is now at 73 almost 10 percent higher than a year ago so we remain pretty confident this trend will continue in the following years so when faced with such a brand new market that is much different from your familiar ones a reliable local partner may can save people a lot of unnecessary effort or hassle

when trying to pivot to china so ohio will be here to provide developers with a one-stop solution to adapt to the local market so as shown on the screen these these games have all recorded millions of downloads and i'm pretty proud to say that ohio played a critical role in publishing these games and introducing doom to more players um and introducing them to the uh to more players in china within our capability so before moving forward with the details of publishing solutions let me briefly introduce to the ohio brand who we are and what we do here so when we started out the ohio brand back in 2019 we made a very conscious decision to focus on casual games we are dedicated to become the most professional and trustworthy casual game publishing platform serving both developers and players worldwide and since then we have become a leading

publisher in china since the very beginning of february 2019 was the breakout success was a game called virus war the game is known as killing virus in other parts of the world it's a very simple shooting of game but it's innovative because the gamer they can control laser spacers to eject vaseline to kill the virus in this gameplay so up till now ohio has assisted numerous developers to publish over 150 casual games out of which 10 of games are from global developers and more than 35 games generated revenue a revenue of over 1 million dollars i believe the figure is much more significant because between 2019 and 2020 ohio's accumulated downloads boosted significantly from 100 million to 500 million times so to this date 20 of our games have made it to the top 10

in apps4 at its peak on one day six games out of that top 10 was actually published by ohio so notice fully among the developers of these hit games to the amount of developer that we work very closely with 63 percent of them are small developers with less than 10 people in their team and 86 of them invested less than 200 000 in game development to this stage we have distributed back over 1 000 sorry 100 million dollars back to developers to support their continuous development so till now we believe that you know these developers they uh they hold great assets in creativity game design and game development and all we need to do at ohio is to enable these incredible developers of getting their names and getting their games in front of more users

and we would like to give this opportunity not only to local developers in china we also wanted to give such opportunities to more developers worldwide um so with all the know-how that we've gained throughout the past we really spare no effort trying to push for the robust development and build up of the casual game sector so in short we provide one stop solution covering creative generations product optimization publishing and marketing support and even ip corporation so we hope that our one stop solution can lower the barrier for developers to reach their target audience as well as lifting the ceiling of the market by unlocking developer creativity whereas they can focus on what they are good at and let us to take care of the rest so our publishing solution is tailored for china market based on our insights and we also can break down the range of support we offered for

developers at different stages so in the case that we've shown earlier on of those five top games we help them either from project initiation by matching the gameplay with a suitable animated ip or trying to help them with quick iterations on versions and monetization improvements and in some cases i will even conduct long-term operation for casual game and how to extend its lifetime value so i will elaborate on these cases in a later slide so let's get back on track to today's topic the art of publishing so before we go into how we work with developers uh let me just lay down the basic foundation on the screen so everybody know that you know the revenue is generated from the difference between two determinants the user acquisition costs and and the ltv of course and those can be optimized in three stages when developers choose to work with ohio so in project initiation it will

help to determine how big the scale is what user acquisition caused the set out to be and in optimization stage that will help to increase the lifetime value and in the publishers stage will help the developers and the game to expand in size so for most of the game developers especially the casual game developers starting out a project is usually the most challenging step because often times they can decide whether or not the game is set out for great success and as for casual games we believe that a simple cpr test is the best way to navigate so instead of making subjective judgment and handpick a potential gameplay we will just let the data speak besides that we also accumulate a database full of valuable creative ideas and gameplay prototypes ideas that we gathered from all different sources even from short form videos we also have

a pool of animated characters that we can work with which is to provide the developer with some necessary help when they when they lacking in creative or when they're lacking in visual design that suit their gameplay so let's now let's take an agent boom and a it's uh let's now let's take adrian bone for example this isn't a third-party shooter game uh we published globally and it would just went live uh in uk a few days ago the game itself was extended from an ip called mr bone on doing some of you may have heard about doing it's the leading short form video platform and it is also it's more well known as tick tock in other parts of the world so in this case we begin by picking the gameplay of belgian and shooting from our gameplay pool and we found out to be pretty acceptable uh accepted welcomed by gamers from really all ages after that by looking at our i.t resource we select

an animated character that is called mr bone and they put which is position itself as a secret agent battling with zombies and turn out to be a really great match with the selected gameplay we have so after producing a demo and conducting a cpr test on doing the game was proven to have great potential and it turned out to be a top hit in china market with millions of downloads and in addition the beauty of collaborating ip and incorporate it into the gameplay help us to lower the user acquisition cost so with the 5 million followers that is ongoing from the original ip the game itself attract a lot of organic downloads and also accumulated over 620 million of video views on doing platform the game also achieved great success in japan and korea and the other parts of the market with ohio's help on localization

so when a project passed on the ctr test it goes to the second stage of game optimization we provide valuable data analysis tool for developers to access and understand several key metrics and in addition from our own path experience we gathered some reusable models for retention optimization and monetization to help greater to extend the lifetime value and also use that model for different game types so here's another example of a specific optimization model of we did on android wobble man is a hyper casual game we published back in early 2020 and it once was once ranked uh both number one in china and also in us however the initial performance of this game was actually not that satisfying we found out that the same version have very different performance on apple users versus data on the android users so in order to

fix the problem we first really first need to understand where the problem is so we conducted a research and found out you know on android users in china they're actually less resistant to interstitial ads and they prefer easier game control so therefore a series of optimization measures were carried out particularly for android users eventually these optimization methods contributed to the improvement of lifetime value for the android performance as the result showed that both the retention rate in the average astro per user increased or by more than 50 percent on these users so when a product improvement has finished the game is almost ready to go and android has a lot to share about publishing casual games at sorry and ohio has a lot to share about publishing casual games in china with the massive content platform under the by dance portfolio

ohio covers about a 1.5 billion mau traffic including doing which has the you know daily active users over 600 million these users contributed much to our user growth and the monetization tool that we use pengo has gathered over a hundred thousand mobile advertisers moreover we also have accumulated experience in user targeting the user research which will benefit our developers to spend the money in where it comes the most so other than our traditional streams and user acquisitions we also equipped ourselves with a powerful publishing capability using the integrated resource for example branding activities content promotions through various content platforms and channel distributions so therefore we can customize growth and operation strategies for different types of games and also add for different and indicator for

different needs of the developers um so here i want to use one page to show how short form video is important why short one video is important and why is the natural habitat habitat for game marketing in china so gaming content on doheen and you know the uh you know for or you or you know may know it as tech talk um the gaming content on doing has quadrupled from uh 2019 to 2020 and from 2019 the overlap between casual game users and short form videos are going is increasing 91 of the mobile game players they watch your phone videos on and with fifty to sixty percent of them they actually using the platform more than six times a day so short form video becomes the most popular way for people to learn and discover games it became a powerful tool that we have to master

and a casual game is an ideal fit due to a simple creative play any time and play anywhere nature content marketing virtual form video video is highly effective and ohio used that you know in every case that when we wanted to promote a game also we recognized the importance of both professionally generated content or user-generated content on these platforms so as a result we build strong relationships with key opinion leaders as well as incentivize the vast community to generate content to maximize game distribution so next i will use some example to demonstrate how publishing to demonstrate our publishing and marketing services so here's another game that we published both in china and then brought it to the global stage the game itself is called combat hero it's a rook like an action casual game and ranked number one in china for weeks in early 2020 and that was rotted overseas in the

second half of the year it has achieved an overall download about 60 million times in china market alone so we carried out a long-term operation for this game building on its initial success not only we try to incubate the game itself into well-received ip across different content platforms we also launched content marketing plans corpora operating official social media channels as well as conducted the ip crossover with a animated character called scissor 7 which is an animation kungfu series to attract new users and activate the existing users after a year this game has launched so the ip corporation helped to bring them 10 000 organic gamers each day and our content marketing campaign based on a collaboration with voice actors in japan also helped to double the monthly

active users during that period so this is another game that we published in china this chinese new year and we plan to bring it to the world station in the coming months so this game is called j master and it's a simulation game that was published back in february 2021 and suddenly and i was so soon it matched the top one and during that month so we said that the market preference has gradually turned towards midcourt casual games and there are a strong curiosity that people have for the j culture so basically the j culture is that you know people when they own and buy bias don't they have to guess what level and what quality the jade is under that stone so that that topic alone generated a lot of content on many content platforms that we daily track so we put forward this idea to the developers we work with and ask them say why don't you try it

out combining a simulation gameplay with the j culture to make the game more content friendly so based on the idea uh developer and us work hand-in-hand to develop the gate and also develop the game and we also launched a big content marketing campaign when the game is published so first we promote professionally jet user generated content videos on doing platform and we also created the in-app hashtags to drive more organic videos you can see that the result was pretty insignificant as far as satisfaction so over 60 thousand videos were published uh sorry were created for jade master many of them are from um you know general content creators and not professional content creators and those videos helped to attract about 7 million downloads during chinese new year and a half of them are driven by content marketing campaign not from user

acquisition so as mentioned in the four cases that was shown in the previous slides uh we offer a one-stop solution from the perspective of a local publisher in china and ohio helped to deliver local market insights ideas that we uh tracked from counter-mark content platforms um some creative guidelines that help to adapt to local markets operational support and also integrated publish and marketing services outside of china we noticed that there are numerous good global casual game developers with incredible ideas avoiding exploration so here we welcome developers of all sizes to work with us and to launch your game in china or even in a global scale we're working very hard to try to reduce the barrier to enter into this market so basically we offer a three corporation model for those who are interested in bringing their games to china for those who are um for those who have a completed game

or simply seeking a publisher we have either exclusive publishing or a localization friendly model which is called redevelopment or for those who have great idea but it's lacking in development resource we can offer product buyout and where the developer can let us to take care on the remaining development part so and also today i just want to mention that for all the global developer who's willing to work with ohio uh we have a time limited offer i'm not just i'm not gonna read the entire slide but for anybody who's interested in working with us in a trial run their product with ohio we have this bonus offer and if you're interested just please contact us through this email so let me quickly wrap up as game speech commented a few days ago ohio is a new kid on a blog in the games industry compared to other global tele publishers

we are pretty young age but we are growing at a good pace um ohio's achievement in china has proven our capability of empowering casual game developer to revenue from group creatives so a hundred games published is some level of success but that was history and we won't stop on a journey discovering good games and lifting the industry ceiling together with developers and we really look forward to cooperating with excellent global developers and help them to bring games into the bigger stage in china and thank you for your time today thank you thank you fan that was a really fascinating and interesting talk and we've actually got a quite a few questions so we've got about you know five ten minutes so i wondered if you're okay for me to ask you some of the questions sure of course fantastic so uh first up we've got um what sorts of uh western games are chinese players enjoying at the moment obviously i think people are factoring

in what kind of games you might be looking to publish what might resonate uh well with the chinese audience right now sure uh let me let me kind of try to break down a couple of you know the question um the question will i try to answer in two perspectives and the first one is that you know what games people are looking at and what kind of localization advice we should give right so often times let me answer the second part because that's the part i think is most challenging um often times when we try to publish gaming in china we thought that you know the visual the art sometimes it's a lot just a little bit of western for the chinese users and for the general public because the casual games um they're not just catering to a small sized audience and they're catering to a greater you know a greater size of gamers so therefore making sure the art and the visual design is not too niche and not too unique is the first

app and when it comes to the game jarrah um from our own experience first of all if the game itself is very creative and let it be a hyper casual game or another game that was developed out of a creative or a hyper casual gameplay often time it can achieve success in china market and for game journals that we see that have potential to have success in here on action game is good um you know third party shooter and fps games are good um and simulation is good but sometimes we have to we have you have to be very specific you have to cater to the taste to the local market so those are three um areas that i think we will welcome um you know games uh global developer to submit to us yeah okay fantastic and uh next up is um how are you different in approach from say joypack

or other china and asia focused publishers what would you say that ohio uh offers that uh maybe some of the others don't right uh so this is very interesting i i you know i spent a slight talking about short film videos and often times when people used to perform videos and you know it's pretty open market right you can you can just use their acquisition on these platforms they uh you can you know for a paid ads and then you can use monetization tools they're pretty open marketers you know everybody can use that however i i think uh what we you know what set out ohio from the other publishers in the market is that first of all we can we can um you know we keep close monitoring of the content of the platform understanding what people are reading and breathing every day what topics they're interested in is there a sudden you know peak in the topic that they wanted to read and observe so those help

us to generate ideas and we record down those ideas that we can give back to the developers to help them with product initiations that's what i said uh what what i mentioned one part of the presentation and the second part is that um shortfall videos can not only be used as a user acquisition it's just a paid you could use the user acquisition campaign the content creators are extremely powerful on these platforms you as long as you mod you incentivize them in the right way asking and combining your gameplay with content and making sure the content creators have enough content to create their own short form video they will they will go to they will try to promote your game so having a good sense of what content can be combined into the gameplay and how you can mod how you can incentivize them

is very important i think we did pretty well on that a lot of our games success was driven throughout content creation and content based marketing campaigns fantastic and um we've got a question here from james at the bottom which is uh please could you explain a little bit more about the bonus fund which was featured in the last slide sure sure it's a very simple one um so we offer a trial bonus from two thousand to five thousand dollars for developers who submit their games and pass the trial test that conducted with ohio so basically it's going to be a reward that was either in cash or or in the trial fund that we give back the further details that will be announced later on and our business development team is working on that fantastic um yeah so keep an eye out for more information and we'll see if we can sneak in a couple more questions um so um the first one is uh

you know what kind of information are you looking for from a developer you know like do they have to have you know chinese language ability and you know um do they have to have certain data and metrics already ready to present to you or can it be an early build game you know what are you looking for from a developer who might be thinking i want to pitch my game to you this is this is going to be a very broad question uh so the model though that we have we have different models that that can be offered to developers with different stage of game development in their in their game development for example if you only have a demo or an idea feel free to send to us so we can tell you whether or not it's a fit if that game is only terrible for china market i think it is best way for us to save them some unnecessary costs so you know when they develop 65 of their games so that can be them can be done but um that will that is kind of a different model when we work we call it a code development with the developer because that requires our publishing

team to put into a lot of effort trying to hold hand-in-hand basically with the developers so for a complete game we just you know we look for typical measures you know the retention average astro the monetization models etc and whether or not they have conducted you know um big marketing or user acquisition campaigns outside of china so those are kind of typical figures in the mattress we will ask for developers but really i think don't worry too much about the stage of development we always have a model we even have a model where we deliver the creative and sending the ideas and basically help the developers to develop the game fantastic yeah and now one other thing i wanted to ask because i i think it's relevant i mean i know uh we here at steel media have an uh beyond idfa free summit coming up on the 20th of april so next uh that coming up um from 20th of april

today from six o'clock and with apple's new update launching possibly even today as well it's something that's really on people's minds is you know do you think this i these idfa changes and other privacy changes will have a big impact in the chinese market and specifically on the work you're doing you know what do you think the effect of this apple update could be yeah i mean i mean this is going to be uh pretty much the game changer especially for user acquisition on the apple platform but i we were still observing basically how that is going to affect our user acquisition strategy but i think um given that we have gradually shifted our focuses and beyond just paid ads to more kind of content marketing content-based promotion that will help us to alleviate some some of the pressure that was driven by idfa yeah okay well that yeah exactly i suppose we will uh we'll all find out as

time goes on won't we care what happens but uh yeah it's going to be an adaption for all of us well thank you so much we've got tons of questions we could go on forever but i don't want to keep you and you know it's a it's been a fantastic talk and an amazing way to to end our art of publishing track that yourselves kindly sponsored so we couldn't do it without you so thank you for not only being here for making it work throughout all the issues and for supporting the track thank you so much no problem it's a great honor to have you here thank you no it's an honor to have you here and yeah to anyone in the audience who's thinking of reaching out you've got all the information there and this talk is going to be in the video vault that you'll all be given access to so uh yeah make sure to reach out if it's uh you know if you're interested in getting uh into the chinese market yeah yeah thank you thank you thank you i thank you thanks everyone

you