At a time when Chinese game manufacturers are targeting the global market, overseas companies are also playing with the idea of the Chinese market.
During the Chinese New Year (February 14) this year, the Cultural Section of the Embassy of Poland in China and the Polish Independent Games Association jointly released the "Guide for Game Developers in the Chinese Market" (hereinafter referred to as the "Guide"), which puts forward a number of suggestions for game developers who are interested in entering the Chinese market (mainly single-player console games).
Although the guide is mainly aimed at overseas independent game developers, Gyro believes that many of the points mentioned in the article may also be worth the attention of Chinese developers, whether you are an industry insider or an ordinary gamer, you may wish to compare the key points circled in this guide to see if the current Chinese game market and user portraits are indeed what they say.
In view of the fact that many of the contents of the "Guide" may already be familiar to Chinese people, here Gyro only extracts some of the relatively "fresh" information for you to read and learn, if you are interested in the full text of the "Guide", you can use the address provided at the end of the article**.
Surveying Chinese players, Polish cultural practitioners are serious
According to the statistics, China has 6700 million players, 21% of whom are console PC users and 75% are mobile games. PC players are spread across different platforms, and most of them only play one game – Steam has about 55 million active users using Chinese Simplified Global; There are 16.7 million host users, and it is expected to grow to 23 million in five years.
Given the sheer size of the user market, the Guide argues that developers don't even need to care about the genre, because no matter how niche the genre is, there is enough audience in China. Unfortunately, most mobile games offer a free-to-play model, and as for paid games, it's hard for the Guide to estimate how many mobile gamers in China are willing to pay for a quality product.
In terms of gaming trends, the Guide notes that many Chinese gamers still see gaming as a way to socialize, so collaboration is essential for games looking to reach a larger audience, especially if it allows for competition between players – an important part of Chinese culture. In addition, it's easy for Chinese gamers to get frustrated with challenging games, especially if the game doesn't have a tutorial, or if the tutorial isn't clear enough, players are more likely to quit and leave negative reviews on Steam.
The guide also mentions that there is another important cultural difference between Chinese and foreign players: humor. Chinese humor relies more on puns and wordplay than on situational or contextual humor. In other words, certain conversations or situations that are considered interesting in Western culture may not be found interesting by Chinese players. In order to ensure that the game's narrative resonates well with Chinese players, game developers should put in the necessary efforts in localization.
In terms of language habits, the Guide says that although China attaches great importance to English education, the overall English language ability of players is very poor. Chinese Simplified should be given more priority than Chinese Traditional; If a game does not have Chinese, Chinese people generally will not play it, or go to the next pirated version of the Chinese version, so even if there is no text in your game, you should still mark that you support Chinese. In contrast, subtitles are more important than dubbing for Chinese players, and well-prepared subtitles are better than poorly prepared dubbing.
In terms of game art style, the Guide believes that Chinese gamers prefer games with "cute" and "cute" art styles, that is, typical Japanese chibi style (Q version characters with 2-3 heads and bodies) - such as "Lost Castle", and animation style - such as "Ash".
At the same time, Chinese gamers are very appreciative of games with unique art styles, such as Monument Valley and Hidden Guys, while Chinese gamers are quite disliked by Western TV shows like Futurama and Family Guy.
How many developers can catch this "splashing wealth"?
Poland is not the only one that favors the Chinese market. In Shanghai in November last year, in addition to the Polish Game ** will bring more than 20 Polish indie games, a number of Japanese independent game companies, including WSS Playground, the developer of "Anchor Girl Heavy Dependence", also used WePlay as an important stage for publicity and sharing.
And the reason why they attach so much importance to the Chinese market is due to the unexpected results of "Anchor Girl Heavy Dependence".
According to the publisher of "Anchor Girl Heavy Dependence", Japanese game studio RYU'Ryuta Konuma, the head of S Office, shared at CEDEC2023 that the 1.2 million sales of the work had 6160,000 came from China, accounting for 51%, and its local base camp, the birthplace of virtual anchor culture, and the main market of visual ** in the past, Japan, sales were 1320,000 copies, accounting for 108%。
It is worth noting that at the beginning of "Anchor Girl Heavy Dependence"**, the wishlist data from Japan was 20,000, and China was only 120 thousand. Hence the ryu'S Office originally intended to use the Japanese region as its main battlefield. Who knew that the day after the game's release, the number of wishlists from China far surpassed Japan, and reached 140,000 a month after its release, which is twice as many as Japan.
Ryuta Onuma emphasized that it was because of this incident that Ryu'S Office began to emphasize the importance of the regional market in China and increased its promotional efforts in China.
Coincidentally, not long ago, an unpopular game called "Angel of the Dusk" also went a similar way. This STG art style hunt made by a Japanese solo game developer did not perform well when it was launched, but after updating the official Chinese with the speed of folk Chinese, the results have improved quite well (nearly 400 Steam reviews, more than 260 from China, with a positive rating of 99%).
In this regard, the game producer @坂葉 is also very confused, "We have never promoted it in China, but as a result, most of the sales of the game came from China, so I think I am lucky and confused."
In Gyro's view, "Anchor Girl Heavy Dependence", "Angel of Twilight", and countless overseas text **g have succeeded in China - in order to eat the Chinese text **g players on the Steam platform, some overseas publishers who used to focus only on the English market have successively launched official Chinese for a number of Japanese ggalgames, and put official Chinese in a very important position to somewhat confirm the sentence mentioned in the "Guide": No matter how niche the game, as long as there are Chinese players, no one will buy it.
However, no matter how "rich and wealthy" from users is, whether developers and publishers can catch it still depends on how much they attach importance to the Chinese market and the demands of players and how quickly they respond.
Now that Poland and Japan are playing a good example, it's time for game practitioners from other countries to follow suit.
The following is a link to the full text of the "Game Developer's Guide for the Chinese Market":