At the launch of Royal Revolt 2 on the Korean market, none of the expectations of flaregames came true, studio co-founder Georg Broxtermann said at White Nights 2015.
When launching the project in South Korea with the support of Kakao, the developers expected that the virality of the project in the new market, as well as retention, would be greater than in the world. In turn, payments are less. They have compiled a list of mandatory stores from two: Google Play and one more – local.
The expectations were well-founded. The first part of the game — Royal Revolt — was especially popular in Asia.
But after the fact, it turned out that the virality of the project, whose promotion the team did literally “by the textbook” (attracting local stars, pre-registration, stickers, and so on) was at the same level as in the world, retention was a little lower compared to the world version, but ARPDAU turned out to be much higher (three to four times more than in the USA).
Trying to understand why the forecasts did not come true, flaregames conducted a study and found out that the South Korean market has changed a lot since the release of the first part in 2012. For example, now — after the release of the iPhone 6 — there is a lot of interest in iOS on this market. And it is absolutely necessary to have a Korean iOS version if you do outdoor and TV advertising.
Moreover, Kakao is not only no longer the only way to promote your project here (Naver services provided Royal Revolt with 20% of total downloads), but it is, in general, overrated (in terms of virality and retention).
So against this background, apparently, flaregames turned out to be glad that their expectation “for money” turned out to be significantly underestimated. Today, Korean players are willing to spend a lot.
