Chinese Games Going West: Common Mistakes in Publishing and Development
I’ve been working in the Chinese game industry for about four years now, and I’d like to share some mistakes committed by studios both big and small in the Chinese gaming industry.
Relying on Anecdotes in Assessing Analytics
A friend of mine was soft launching a dark, cthulhu-style match 3 for western markets. The game art was already very unique. The core game mechanics worked just as well as any other match 3. It was easy to grasp, but as you progressed, the strategy and tactics involved in the battles was layered nicely with increasing complexity. It was a solid start.
But the devs decided to shelve the project indefinitely. Why?
One of the devs said something like: “The one and three day retention figures are really bad. [Game B] has a 3 day rention of xyz.”
Having some benchmarks in mind for how your game should perform is a good idea. What isn’t a good idea, however, is comparing your fledging new title with a tested, iterated, and mature game that has ironed out most of the kinks. A crucial decision was made based on the supposed performance of a completely different game.
As with any industry, insiders talk. They share their experiences and knowledge, yes, but sometimes decisions are made purely from anecdote or from one single data point.
So the game was shelved, never to be seen again. It wasn’t even licensed out to another publisher. The dev team was partially fired and partially re-assigned to other projects.
In catching up with colleagues, I’ve often heard similar justifications for shutting down a project or drastically changing course:
- “Game ABC has a much better ARPU, so ours is obviously a failure.”
- “Our game didn’t achieve $----- in revenue in the first month, so we’re completely swapping out the skins and theme.”
Humans love stories and anecdotes. We associate with others in our profession to learn what works, what doesn’t work, etc. But I think these developers are leaving a lot of potential on the table by quickly abandoning a project based on one or two data points, or by comparing their game to another in such a rushed, shallow fashion. There are so many variables at play.
Which brings us to a related problem…
Violating Goodhart’s Law
Goodhart’s law states:
“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
And in this context: When a worker or department only cares about their KPIs, many times this can damage a game/brand/company in aggregate.
TRUE STORY
One time I was helping out with an ARPG launch based on a famous Korean IP line. The launch wasn’t bad, but I discovered players were mocking the ads we were running. Why? Because the ads were obviously fake and misleading. I had a discussion with the people designing the ad creatives.
I said something along the lines of: “Hey, do you think we could use these assets from the game in the ads instead? Players are mocking and reporting the ads we’re pushing.”
Their reply (paraphrasing): “In order to reach our KPIs, the click through rate has to be XYZ. The other ads didn’t perform nearly as well, so we’ll keep running these.”
I suspect these ads had a higher click through rate precisely because players were engaging with them and mocking them in the comments.
In many other instances, I’ve witnessed games rushed to market that could have greatly benefited from just a few more weeks of polish. Setting a goal date for a beta test or launch is necessary, but when developers put meeting that deadline over everything else, they risk greater harm to the game’s performance and their own reputation. This isn’t a highly anticipated title like GTA VI or Half-Life 3. Most people don’t even know the game exists. So why rush things out merely to meet an arbitrary deadline?
Medieval and High Fantasy Everything
This is a real tragedy! I’ve seen so many Chinese developers take a fully-developed game with a Chinese theme (Ex. Warrings States, Three Kingdoms) and re-skin it into a medieval or high fantasy theme.
Why spend the time and money to remove something that could be its distinguishing feature? How many medieval and fantasy games already exist in the West?
True, foreigners may not fully appreciate the richness and complexity of Ancient China, but that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t love to play a game in this setting! Escapism. Imagination. Something different. That’s part of the reason why we play video games.
Prototyping and performing focus studies to discover player preferences is one thing, but far too often I see Chinese developers completely swap a game’s skin, but then ignore the more important differences in the forms of: monetization, pacing/difficulty, extremely busy and hostile UI design, etc.
Localization, Monetization, and User Experience Treated as Afterthoughts
Maybe you’ve seen it, maybe you haven’t. Chinese user interfaces are busy, messy, and, in my opinion, hostile to the overall user experience. More often than not, Chinese developers will leave that busy UI for foreign players to contend with.
Most Chinese apps are built like this. Menus everywhere. Shiny, pulsating buttons demanding your attention. Human reward psychology incentivizes this design to some extent. Login rewards? Dopamine. Daily or weekly quest rewards? Dopamine. Tapping on that little stack of wood to collect it? Satisfying. Western developers do this too. It’s not new. But the extent to which Chinese websites, apps, and games do this—well, it’s really overwhelming to me. Chinese cities in general are loud, busy, lively places with stimulating hitting you from all angles. Maybe this is why Chinese users don’t seem to mind this kind of design? I don’t know.
Anyways, bad design in user interfaces then easily creeps into localization. Some menu items are labeled with just one or two Chinese characters. Sometimes those characters are stacked vertically. Good luck fitting a translated string into those constraints. When you couple a lexically dense language like Mandarin Chinese with an overcrowded, busy UI, you often get a second-rate player experience.
So that’s it for now. In the next post I think I’ll highlight what Chinese developers and publishers excel at. While some Chinese gamers had access to and indulged in many of the classic games that are so dear to Western players, many Chinese gamers got their first tastes from the likes of Korean MMOs and browser games. This definitely has impacted how Chinese companies make their games. Stay tuned!
