Chinese touch for universal stories
The United States has accounted for the largest share (almost 31 percent) of gaming companies' overseas income. Japan was second with 22.4 percent contribution to total overseas income while South Korea was third with about 14.3 percent, said the report.
While the global mobile game sales revenue increased 9.7 percent year-on-year to top $68.1 billion last year, Chinese gaming companies collectively took the lion's share (30 percent), dislodging other market players from the US, Japan and South Korea.
Deng Hui, gaming industry sales director for Google China, said that the annual growth rate of Chinese gaming companies registered in overseas markets is now double the number reported in the domestic market. The prevalence of mobile games has facilitated their overseas expansion and mobile payment systems have solved the biggest difficulty that web-based game developers faced a decade ago.
For mobile game publishers, overseas markets may be attractive destinations, but Liu acknowledged that understanding them, especially their local culture, entails high costs.
"The differences resulted from various cultural backgrounds, whether it is ostensible features such as user habits, or more in-depth things such as the fundamental demand for games. This will result in the cost of understanding. If you try to explain the differences by adding explanation in a game, it will be very annoying and significantly affect the user's experience," he said.
In this sense, when Chinese gaming companies expand overseas, they should try to deliver messages or tell stories with values that are universally accepted, for there are always similarities in human nature, Liu said.
"We can say with all confidence that the production capability of Chinese gaming companies is first-rate in the world. What we lack now is creation if compared with industry big names such as Disney and Nintendo. But with the development of the Chinese gaming industry over the past few years, I believe we will catch up in that aspect very soon."
