Selling in Asia

Ali_WoodAli_Wood Member Posts: 52
in Business and Marketing Theory
Since seeing this picture i have seriously started to consider changing all the font in my games to say mandarin and then publishing them again

image

Has anyone tried doing that yet as the potential must be huge for free apps with IAP to make money

Comments

  • kinzuakinzua Member Posts: 554
    In that very circle there are more than 100 different languages too. And mandarin is certainly not the most popular one. You might want to stay onto english. On a different note, your game won't get any better if you change language.
  • TheGabfatherTheGabfather Member Posts: 633
    I've never offered multilingual support for any of my titles, but I can assure you that if you do decide to implement it you won't necessarily have to translate for most of the Asian countries.

    I think Chinese is the given exception. Maybe Korean and Japanese as well. But for most countries (like the Philippines), you're 100% O.K. with English. Heck, I don't know a single person here who doesn't change his Google.ph homepage to the international (American English) one.
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  • Ali_WoodAli_Wood Member Posts: 52
    Thanks for the input @TheGabfather and @kinzua

    It's not to say that a vast amount of people can speak and understand English despite it not being their native tongue things like this

    http://listverse.com/2008/06/26/top-10-most-spoken-languages-in-the-world/

    lead me to believe out of those 1 billion plus people there must be a large percentage that don't use English at all

    What i really wanted to know was if anyone has seen decent sales by trying an app not with the option of different languages but an completely different version so that non english speakers would find your app when searching for it!
  • TinpotTinpot Member Posts: 54
    edited November 2013
    I've done some research on this over the past year thinking the same thing, and i've found some not so enticing info on china.

    Although there's 1.3 Billion People in china, 100 million IOS devices and nearly 200 million android devices (if not more now), 40% of the IOS devices in china are jailbroken (aka using illegal means to get their apps), and there's really no Android App store in china to submit to to make money out of with Gamesalad.

    The dozens of apps stores for android in china will let you submit your app, but they are nearly all free to download sites, and since there's no IAP partnership with any of these app stores with Gamesalad, and there's no external source of ads at the moment, there's no real way of making money from android.

    There's nothing stopping you from converting your language to mandarin\chinese, but there's other languages that monetize better, with the tools gamesalad offers to make the money. Japan and Korea in that region would do well for conversion for both IOS and Android.

    Most other languages you could continue to use english. You'd be wise to at least translate your descriptions and keywords of the app for a specific language, which would be a good start.

  • TinpotTinpot Member Posts: 54
    edited November 2013
    Illegal may have been a little bit of a generalisation for everyone. Certainly nothing wrong with jailbreaking a device if the intentions are genuine.

    The point i was trying to make in the context of chinese users, is they have their devices jailbroken because, it gives them easy access to the multitude of app stores in china. (something laymens, outside of china, dont generally have access too) And we already know whats available on these app stores.

    I've already seen one of the apps made with GS (android) have possibly more "downloads" from a few of these app stores, than they've made from all of the legit stores, but unfortunately there's no way of making money out of it.

    I do hear its getting better though.
  • Ali_WoodAli_Wood Member Posts: 52
    @Tinpot that is exactly the reply i wanted..

    The statistics are perfect and very interesting. Looking at it now we are talking about only 60 million non jailbroken devices and of those some will speak English so the numbers aren't quite as good as first thought

    The latest app that i am currently making will be free but with IAP as i think that's how things are going now so there would be no benefit having a jailbroken device. Unless of course they hack the app itself but i can't imagine many people taking the time to do that

    I'll give it a try with Portuguese and Mandarin IF i get decent downloads in English as it's very little work to change

    Thanks again for your input
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