Features of the gaming market in China - part 3

At the end of June, I happened to accompany the Vice-President of Asia to Unity Technologies, John Goodale, on his trip to St. Petersburg. I knew about our Unity Games China division and the freshly-supported support of Tizen, so I did everything to impress John with the projects of Russian developers and the atmosphere of the Russian igroproma in general, hoping to set up fruitful communication with our Asian offices.

I was very surprised then - literally everyone around, big and small, already had experience with China, but there were no any positive results.

“It’s possible to agree on a maximum of 5% of revenues, but in the end it’s not clear how to take even that promised miser, don’t come out to get analytics, user data, in fact, any information about your application,” is a rough idea of ​​our interlocutors. In the worst case, a clone application appeared in one of the hundreds of application stores, and at that end they stopped responding to calls and emails.
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“China is like the European Union, but in Asia: 23 provinces, 4 municipalities, 5 autonomous regions, 2 regions with a special administration procedure. “People of different cultures, with different languages, regions of very different levels of development,” explains Allen Fu, head of Unity Games China, “about half of the population of 1.3 billion live in cities, and more than 40 of the largest cities are in developing regions.”

The mobile content market is full of intermediary companies that are ready to help bring your application to the market. “In China, there are more than 400 app stores for Android, we want to cover only the best - the top 20,” says Andrew Tang, head of Unity Games China, “but usually the developer is offered 3-5% of revenue, maybe 7% if you are lucky. But we were able to achieve more favorable conditions - 20%, sometimes more, because we were able to negotiate with the top providers, we talk at the level of top management. Now we can offer good conditions to the creators of games. It is difficult for a Western person to understand that intermediaries take not 20-30%, but 80-90%, but these are features of the Chinese market. A huge market makes it possible to extract a significant profit with 10% of the income, "

If you count the accounts of mobile operators, you get an impressive figure of 1.1 billion. About half of the subscribers go to the Internet from their phones, 20% have access to 3G networks.

Sales of smartphones in China. Source: Enfodesk Research

The active gamers Chinese Internet Information Center of the Internet considers 286 million mobile users. The calculator and common sense come to the conclusion: 2/3 of the potential gaming audience does not have fast mobile Internet.

“Most often, people only have 2G,” confirms Bobo Bo, the community manager of Unity Technologies China, “therefore it is very important that the game is small, the less the better, otherwise people cannot download it. Most have strict limits on mobile traffic, and Wi-Fi networks are not so much around. ”

This picture is organically supplemented by the following figure from a source already familiar to us: 72.4% of players never paid for games or content in games.

Nevertheless, the mobile gaming market in China in 2012, according to various estimates, ranges from 521 million to 960 million US dollars. Agree, even a small portion of this pie is worth the effort.



“It is very important to make the payment process as fast as possible, without filling out forms and entering numbers, payment via SMS services works best, even if you have to pay tribute to the operator,” Allen Fu shares her experience, “but often the choice of payment system is dictated by the app store. We have built a special SDK that supports top billing systems, in most cases we can provide one-button payment - this is very important in China. ”

Paid applications, even if they cost $ 0.99, “do not work” in China, partly because of advanced piracy, partly because of the lack of a convenient and secure system of payment by bank cards. Moreover, 59.6% of gamers say they don’t see the point of paying for games, when there are so many free games around, but they are willing to pay for in-game content - it collects 90.6% of all payments.



We summarize all three parts of my story with numbers from the Beijing Linekong studio. 34% of revenue from the Unity-game Legend of the King (王者之剑) comes from iOS users, and 66% comes from Android: 26% through Qihoo 360, 18% through 91 Mobile, 11% through the company's own channels and the remaining 11% are payments from other channels.

"In China, the most important is the speed of work, if you do not release your application to the Chinese market first, it will be copied and then you will not get anything at all" - smiles Allen Fu goodbye.

Features of the gaming market in China - part 1
Features of the gaming market in China - part 2
My blog is in English (including about China and ChinaJoy)