Growth of Chinese Market
Chinese entertainment & media industry is rapidly recovering from COVID-19’s control. Currently, Chinese entertainment & media’s recovery rate during 2021~2025 is 5.1% which is 4.6% higher than any other countries.
Chinese contents consumption has been categorized into unique and diverse. The number of users has been rapidly increasing, and due to these increases the number of content creators such as OTT platform service, video game & E-sports, and virtual reality will continue to grow and increase their market revenue.
Latis Global, which provides global localization, CS/GM, QA Service for Global Game developers, helps to launch games globally and increase their quality.
Today we will check about China’s global game market.
Chinese Gaming Industry:
Overseas Expansion and Future Perspective
Recently, the most notable country in the global game market is China, especially during COVID-19 crisis. What are the reasons that the Chinese industry escaped from their in-market and was able to expand worldwide?
First, China’s gaming industry is becoming strict from time to time. In a Chinese news article back on August 3rd of 2021, “Mental Opium” has been growing to a billion-size industry.
The article mentioned that the minors’ internet addiction is increasing and mental damage from online game is posing as a big problem to the growth of the children. This shows high restriction and attitude about the game from the government and media.
China’s game license is published by the government, and unlike the other countries’ game ratings, the Chinese government is establishing high standards for any developer to launch a game.
Back in 2018, getting a game license was difficult. After this time, the licensing rate is increasing but still it is extremely limited on the number of releases. And even by August 2021, there were no games that were approved for a gaming license from the Chinese government.
Not just game releases, but also managing the game in the Chinese market is getting harder day by day so most of China’s game developers are focusing on the global market.
Chinese Games are growing fast in the Global Market
Chinese Game’s overseas expansion is increasing every year. Starting last 2017, sales across the world had been increasing annually. Their sales revenue was $8.27 billion in 2018, $9.56 billion in 2018, $11.195 billion in 2019, and reached $15.45 billion in 2020 which was $3.855 billion higher compared to 2019. It was increased by 33.25% compared to the same period of the previous year, and it is still growing rapidly.
2020 China-developed mobile games’ top ten grossing countries were in the US, Japan, Korea, Germany, UK, France, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Indonesia, and Brazil which accumulated 73.41% of the total gross. The highest ranking was US that was able to post 27.55% of the total gross. Next was Japan which netted 23.91%, and Korea with 8.81%. These three countries comprised the 60.27% of the total sales of Chinese-developed mobile games.
Success of Chinese game is Localization
Chinese games have been successful in each country wherein it had a high quality of localization.
1. Multi-language localization
Chinese game developers provide multiple languages based especially on Chinese games’ top grossing countries’ languages. This will be a pleasant experience to localize on high potential market to provide quality service.
2. Localize through professional game translating companies
Game translation can be done by machine translation, fan translation, freelancer, or professional translator. Chinese game developers choose global game-based professional translator companies to provide a higher quality of localization.
[Image: Chinese Game Genshin were released with multi-language]
3. Userbase localization
When Chinese game developers request localization, they also prioritize user’s satisfaction especially if the translation quality is mediocre. Users may feel an unpleasant experience, so they focus on providing a higher quality of translation.
4. Improving through a higher quality of localization
Game localization is not just a translation. Localization should consider specific country’s culture and religion. To provide higher quality of game localization, they will need to have a local language testing, technician testing, and language testing before launching the game.
With these practices, Chinese developers reached total sales revenue of $15.45 billion in 2020. Lots of experts in the industry are predicting that Chinese games will be the biggest game exporting country in the world soon.
This article has been referred from 『Metaverse, VRAR & Clous game – 2021’s Chinese Games Oversea expansion (《元宇宙，VR/AR 与云游戏展望：中国游戏出海白皮书2021》) 』
