Development: Adapt Strategies Locally
Facing a diverse global market, no single development strategy fits all, thus it is necessary to formulate strategies adapted to local conditions, especially in terms of differentiated pricing strategies.
For gaming products, once a certain market size is reached, many developers will set different strategies. For example, a developer of a certain game stated that the game provides localized content in the Middle East and also has local community groups to serve local players.
Setting up separate teams to support a single game is a costly affair, and most developers do not adopt such a strategy.
Developers mentioned that when developing products, attention should be paid to activities related to the main distribution markets, such as developing customized content for local festivals and prioritizing high-revenue markets (in order: the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom), and the Asia-Pacific market outside of Japan and Korea should not be overlooked.
Get Ready: Be Prepared
Testing in different markets is a complex engineering task, and proper promotion and testing can ensure preparedness.
Developers involved in discussions stated that they use their different products for cross-platform promotions to increase the UA of different games, achieving higher conversion rates. By testing cross-platform promotions, they achieve a more even distribution of user ages and countries.
Focusing on store rankings in different markets, focusing on organic growth rather than paid UA is also a frequently mentioned focus by developers participating in discussions. According to some developers' discussions, 70% of their game users come from organic growth, and 30% from cross-platform promotions, hence developers with successful experiences in Southeast Asia suggest separating paid UA from organic growth and cross-platform promotional traffic for analysis.
Developers mentioned that for early development testing, they use Google Play's Early Access feature, which allows a small group of players to try the game and observe them, measuring their stickiness and profitability indicators with the game. Besides, finding a small target country or region for your product in advance and treating them as key areas for testing the waters is very important.
Localization: When in Rome, Do as the Romans Do
Localization is key to retaining overseas users at first contact, and adapting to local customs is crucial.
Many developers stated that in the process of game localization, the most difficult part is finding a high-quality local partner. For games with complex stories, finding a high-quality localization team is not easy, but once the plot is well localized, it can immerse players in the game's story, and conveying emotions in a localized manner is crucial to creating this sense of immersion.
Grow: Finding the Right Customers for Growth
Researching cultural differences for different markets and customer groups to quickly adjust products and operations is a phase many successful overseas developers have gone through.
More and more overseas developers are using Firebase to understand user behavior in different markets. For example, American gamers prefer a faster game pace to unlock new content, while Japanese players can accept longer waiting times.
The fast-paced American market and the relatively stable Japanese market with high player loyalty are important, but the world is large, and there are many "gold mines" that are easily overlooked. For instance, Indonesia is the fourth largest market in the world, rarely noticed by developers; and Mumbai, with a population of 53 million, more than South Korea, also holds tremendous opportunities.
Some developers have been successful in the United States, but the lifetime value (LTV) of American users is much lower than that of China, which puzzles many. In fact, experienced developers share that American players do not like the pay-to-win model, and compared to Asian markets, American players value the social experience more, meaning they prefer playing games with friends, leading to a higher overall migration rate and thus a lower LTV in the United States.
Therefore, developers need to find the right customers based on the characteristics of their products, which is a prerequisite for fully leveraging the product's value.
Earn: Monetization Can Be Strategically Planned
Game monetization is a challenging issue for many developers.
Developers expressed the hope for tools that can establish models to predict revenue, such as setting up payment points in games and using models and imported data to estimate approximate revenue.
Currently, the visit counts (Acquisition) and conversion counts (Conversion) in the Google Play backend are independent of each other, and many developers who measure revenue conversion using conversion rates and average revenue per paying user (ARPPU) hope to integrate visit and conversion counts for easier statistics and calculations.
