It can be really tough to break into the Asian market, maybe even mysterious. Although there is a large difference in user behavior between Western and Asian players, Youzu Interactive has been very successful in localizing games. They have even been able to make it into the Top 10 in more than 60 countries overseas. In a lecture at Casual Connect Europe entitled Going Global – Local Operation Experience for Over 100 Countries, Yuli Zhao focused on what developers should do rather than what they shouldn’t do. Here is a key finding that Yuli described: “Because there are a small group of deep pocket players, whale players, in Asian games, when we bring the game to Western markets we don’t want to make the non-paying users feel bad about it so there are some items which is to price extremely high in our previous version in Asian market. Actually, we divided these items into smaller packages so that when the players pay for the virtual items, they will view the pricing as not that high but in reality, they need to buy the whole group of virtual items to get the final ones.”

Three of the top world markets comes from Asia are China, North America and Japan. Here are three findings which Yuli highlighted:

• Style is not fine Art: Glowing effect and outstanding outfit affected why they got features by Apple.
• Compatibility: Fast frame speed on lower end mobile phone at 20+ a must.
• Localization: extend the life cycle of the game by changing rewards, difficulty by country and the number of incoming game events.

For more useful tips on how to break through the cross-cultural barrier, see the full lecture below.