The Russian Playrix has excellent performance in Asia. The reason for the success in the region, the company calls the quality of its products, not cultural adaptation.
Playrix is one of two Western publishers whose mobile games were in the Top 100 of the App Store and Google Play in all key Asian countries (China, Japan and South Korea) in February. The name of the second company is Supercell.
App Annie company told about this in its blog. She also interviewed Yuri Labintsev, Vice President of Business Development at Playrix.
In an interview with representatives of the analytical platform, Yuri shared that the success of Playrix in Asia was a surprise for the company: “It turned out naturally: for our first hit Township, we immediately made localizations in Chinese, Japanese and Korean (there were 12 localizations in total), and opened the game to the whole world. When buying ads, we noticed that China and Japan are showing excellent results. It became clear that it was necessary to add new advertising networks and scale success.”
At the same time, the company does not position itself as an expert in the region and does not understand itself what is the reason for such a great interest in its products from the Asian audience: “We don’t know why our games are so popular. These are probably good games. When we launch a new game, we cannot predict whether this game will be popular in Asia.”
For these markets, the company does not specifically change either the monetization of games or the visual component. “We don’t think we understand the culture in Asian countries well enough so that we can change something in the game and make it significantly better,” Labintsev notes.
However, the company tries to take into account cultural peculiarities when it comes to promotion. For example, for Japan, Playrix created separate promos that are seriously different from similar ones in other regions. But this, according to Yuri, is an exception: “for the rest of the countries, we used a common set of creatives, choosing with the help of tests those that work better in a particular country.”
Labintsev calls the development of a game that users will like a universal way to get a game into any cash top: “If you can’t attract users so that it makes a profit, then there is no point in getting into the top. Choose a strategy to attract users that will give maximum profitability, then scale it. How good the game is in terms of user retention and conversion to paying users is much more important than marketing. Positions in the top are always a consequence of both the quality of the game and the strategy of attraction.”
Source: App Annie