Tips on making your hyper-casual game a success in China

hello everybody thank you for coming out to learn more about China and hyper casual so a little bit about me to start off I started in mobile gaming in 2013 worked for a few companies fiber just a mediation platform hyper Amex which is a brand network out of New York most recently I was the VP of business development at native X and now I am the GM of the Americas forum integral so a little bit more about minta girl we're founded in 2015 we have nine offices around the world we are the number one ad platform in China and

AIPAC and we have over 200 employees with 150 million in revenue in 2017 so the goal for integral is to be the bridge between the East and the West and traditionally a lot of developers who have Chinese traffic were actually Chinese developers now as hyper casual has become more popular we found we find a lot of global developers having Chinese traffic so our goal is really to educate the developers in the West about the opportunities of the east and more recently a lot of the Chinese developers with the the game freeze which we'll talk about later are now expanding to the west as well so some of the partners that we work with which you can see here you might recognize a lot of these these icons on the advertising side some large players

like fun games for free jam city and on the developer side especially in the hyper casual space we work with voodoo line studios tasty pill green panda play play works and outfit seven so to understand the opportunity in China I think it's important to understand how mobile focus China is so China is for the most part skipped the PC and ninety-eight percent of Chinese users or Internet connected users access through a mobile phone so there's a lot of reliance on the mobile device and Chinese users expect to be able to do basically everything on their mobile device also an important concept when looking at it through the Chinese lens is the super app so a good example the super app is we chat within WeChat you

can do many things you can do you can order a cab you can you can order food you can you can talk to talk to your colleagues and send you know PDFs in excels and and do work they also have a mini programs program within WeChat which allows developers to insert their service into WeChat so the users don't have to leave WeChat and a good example of this is to book a DD which is essentially a Chinese uber or lyft within the app but more importantly related to this talk it they have a mini program for games as well so if you're developing hyper casual games you can also develop mini games within WeChat and basically leverage you know they're a billion users as I mentioned earlier we chat is the preferred method of communication I know internally I'm integral we typically use WeChat more often than email another great thing about WeChat is that you can pay people instantly as

basically anybody with we chat you can pay so there's no fragmentation between you know PayPal or venmo or anything like that and Chinese users are very familiar and basically is the norm to pay with our mobile phone which is great for our IEP and you also can share you know moments within WeChat you have to remember there is no snap there's no Instagram there's no Facebook in China so basically we chat is the super app where you can do all of that so more than the opportunity of China here at some numbers produced a growing numbers 782 million smartphone users an important note is the 80/20 split between iOS and Android and we see that game revenues are almost triple that of non game revenues which is which is a great opportunity for hyper casual developers and then more so drilling

down into the opportunity for mobile games specifically you can see you know a penny expects 120 billion downloads by 2022 and you can see here that China is essentially double the size of the US so there's there's definitely opportunity now and you can see there's you know pretty exponential growth until 2022 so we can talk about the reasons a why hyper casual is popular in China and I think the number one reason is accessibility so for most users hyper casual is their first instance with games this is where they learn game play where they learn learn core loops and it's very easy to essentially play your first title China also has a lack of consoles so PlayStation Xbox all these

types of gaming consoles are not popular so China has essentially skip that and mobile is you know their main gaming device the age of mobile users in China is getting younger and younger which is which is great for getting your audience and and your brand out at an early age there's also low commitment for hyper casual games so hyper casual games have a hyper propensity to convert traditional like not you know quote-unquote non-gamers and to downloading a game and testing out their first game and there's also been a focus on less of core gaming so male Chinese users are typically playing less core games and playing more hyper casual games as they are busier with their lives so here's a snapshot of the top iOS publishers globally and you can see here that there are quite a few Chinese

companies but there's also you know a lot of international companies on this list so voodoo is that Buddha's a large one and a good partner of ours joy Pak is also here with plays in theory and outfit 7 and we see that there is going to be you know more global companies populating this list in the future so the question typically comes down to okay we know the market size we know that China is mobile only we know there's huge opportunity how do I get started and do I start on iOS or Android well the short answer is that you should do both but I would say if you wanted to focus on one you should focus on iOS because iOS allows you to self-publish and kind of get started immediately whereas Android you're gonna kind of have to work with a local partner or slash publisher get a license and basically get distribution through all the fragment and app stores in China so

China doesn't have you know standardized Google Play they'd rather have more of you know hundreds of different app stores which the top six are probably going to drive the most volume which need a publisher with relationships with those those app stores to kind of get you distribution so some examples of those publishers are Nettie's $0.10 Joy pack yota one I dream sky and when you're considering an Android publisher you should also look at their portfolio and what their expertise is some some publishers focus on hardcore games where other publishers focus more on hyper casual games one last note on iOS and Android when it comes to hyper casual ad monetization is basically at the core of your business and helps you do you know more effective view a the higher the ad LTV you have so i OS gives you an advantage there because the CPMs are quite high compared to android so it's

just something to keep in mind and then when you're looking at io s and Android if you are working with a publisher typically it's it's used for Android but if you get a better deal doing both iOS and Android and and kind of taking China off your hands with working with a publisher you can go that route as well so so the the fun stuff is is China regulation and the ever changing kind of news around the the bands of games and the approval games and the news right now is that China has revamped their process and they've actually switched the game approval team and during that process a big chunk of 2018 there were essentially no game approvals so right now they're kind of working through the backlog but with that said that really doesn't affect iOS again with iOS you can self publish and kind of go live but for Android there's still queue I think they're doing around 110 games a

month so it's going to take some time again Android will need an approval and license and China is also having more restrictions on youth specifically around you know bad vision concerns for for youth and at myopia so Tencent is also taking notice of this and they're actually limiting gameplay in one of their titles honor of Kings restricting you 13 to 18 playing to two hours two hours a day and also limiting gameplay beyond 9:00 p.m. so all these kind of at least the restrictions on the amount of gameplay is also good news for hyper casual and the quick iteration of gameplay so when it comes to UA I think it's important to utilize unique supply in China because that's going to essentially give you the most scale and when you have it when you have more scale you can optimize better also

working with a local partner for your creatives so I think a lot of developers you know tend to Google Translate or use an outsourced developer or outsource translation service to kind of optimize their creatives but I think working with a local partner in the Chinese market can help with localization culturalization of your creatives and that in turn increases your conversion rate for you a it's also important to test multiple videos and playable z' to increase conversion I think having a mix of a mix of both is important and the key here for hyper casual specifically is to convey some sort of value or your gameplay within the first few seconds so the user knows kind of exactly what they're getting when that when they download so also here's kind of an example of some playable ads and the importance of creative at least from you a bidding

perspective is that if you have you know strong you a creatives with your conversion rate multiplied by you know typically a low CPI for hyper casual you even can be competitive with you know more hardcore or core games which is important because the higher your you know effective bid is and the waterfall you'll be you know attracting or you'll be higher in the water phone you'll essentially get better quality users so some when you're looking at tracking tools here are a few that we kind of recommend adjust and tangent do a great job and if you're looking for you know some type of cost savings you can also check out you know hot cloud as well for some for some cost efficiencies so as mentioned before the core of hyper casual is really around ad monetization

and since hyper casual is mainly ad focused most of your LTV is going to come from ads so the more effective you can be on monetization the better so some of the ad platforms that you know you can use our integral byte dance and AdMob specifically for for the China market and then some of the mediation partners in MO pub Apple of and up our and up LTV and the idea is that you you may or may not know but China's average CPM is twenty to thirty dollars sometimes the CPMs are actually higher than english-speaking and the way that you you kind of go about it is having the best localized partner for your traffic so you if you do plan to go into China you want to make sure you match your your supply with your demand and pick a specialized partner that handles that market so you'll see you know a lot of the hyper casual guys like voodoo and line Studios work with specific partners on this list to make sure they have the

highest at LTV so what type of ad formats should we be looking at specifically forever casual hyper casual is a genre where are you know key key game loops short game loops where there are a lot of natural breaks in the game so interstitials are naturally a fit there's also a area for rewarded video for different types of you know soft currencies or limited items and you can also test splash ads or native ads and since hyper casual is basically all ad focus is important to test multiple ad formats to see what kind of mix is best for your title so in closing remember to work with the local partner or publisher that has expertise in this market not only for you know getting your app out there but

also for kind of either you a creatives and you a spend as well stay current with the current regulation and news around China and mobile gaming if you want to get started immediately iOS is the way to go with with basically the best monetization on the outside and make sure you review your ad stack to make sure you have a China focus a PAC focus network to handle your new traffic and you want to leverage multiple creatives on the UA side and make sure they're localized and cultural eyes to have the best conversion rate so with that I would like to open it up if you guys have any questions about hyper casual in China do you guys have any questions yes just a second I've heard that there's there's a to have somebody

in China that actually working with you can be create more of a receptivity to your games if it's like coming from within China there's there tends to be a better uptick you know better acceptance of your game is that something to consider or that or am i hearing this wrong I don't think it it matters too much in regards to where the game or where the the game is actually published but I do think if you have somebody there who is familiar with kind of like you know the cultural norms or the design of the game like you know maybe using red or or bold fonts or things like that then that can definitely help with the aesthetics of the game which which may in turn be better for your game but there's there's plenty of international studios with without representation in China that are doing well in the hyper casual market okay all right great any other question yes

[Music] is there any government will review on the ad creatives that go through the ad networks at all on that content itself not the ad creatives no but you do you do want to be concerned about just the general restrictions on like you know blood violence anything against the government any other question I think we have time for at least one more oh okay we can do both okay so back on the ad thing so will the ad networks handle that for the developer yes yeah so we can basically take in your assets and and and make sure that your creative is compliant yeah okay and then just a

second Jeff I'm getting there hi I work with a global media company and we license digital and print content from country to country uh-huh we've got a relationship with copyright agency of China for three years we've only gotten four things approved and they were children's children's books with no text if we send them something with text it just takes forever and it gets kicked back your company are you able to take something through the process or are you just figuring out where the loopholes are and then we drive trucks through it yeah so for us we're we're basically working with apps that are kind of already approved helping them get more users or monetizing their existing users I think it's more so the publishing companies they're gonna help you get the license and the approval and no we we have to go thank you very much Jennings everybody you