We’ll be supporting the game by marketing it in the region, and as we mentioned we will be focused on rolling out new content and levels. How will you be attempting to push Kill Shot Bravo back up the charts? Any China-specific updates/campaigns? We are a very analytics-driven company, and we’ve been monitoring the game’s performance very closely to learn everything we can about the market. We now have to support the game with smart, targeted marketing campaigns, and we have to continue to optimise the gameplay based on what we learn about the Chinese audiences. We now have to support the game with smart, targeted marketing campaigns. The drop-off wasn’t entirely unexpected, since we knew the game would get less downloads after it stopped being featured. Kill Shot Bravo suffered a drop-off in China after initial success. We are big believers in Games-as-a-Service and we are constantly launching new updates to all of our games, but perhaps the biggest change in the Chinese version of Kill Shot Bravo is that the team were on an extremely aggressive update publishing schedule, even for us. We obviously translated the text, and on top of the tweaks to the gameplay, economy, and energy system that we mentioned earlier, we also worked with Cheetah to develop a custom publishing schedule for our updates, because it is known that Chinese gamers consume content much faster than gamers from other parts of the world. We didn’t have to change too much in order to culturalise the game for the Chinese market. Was the game culturalised for the Chinese market? What was the biggest change, and are you planning more based on feedback? They worked with us to recommend some changes to the gameplay, mainly from an in-game item tuning standpoint, and they also advised us on making small tweaks, like awarding more energy and optimising IAP price points. We may know a lot about developing shooter games, but we did not necessarily have the appropriate expertise on publishing games in China, so we wanted to partner with somebody who did. Cheetah turned out to be the perfect partner. How important was Cheetah Mobile in establishing this early momentum, and what specifically did it bring to the project?Ĭheetah was crucial to the game’s early momentum. We are still learning as we go, but thanks to Cheetah’s help and expertise, we were able to enter the market by starting out on the right foot. They provided excellent guidance to help us tailor the game for Chinese audiences, and they did an outstanding job of securing great marketing and store featuring exposure in all the main app stores. We had done our research and we knew that Chinese gamers enjoyed fast-paced, high-fidelity action games. It had been a hit in all the other countries we’d launched it in, so we hoped that Chinese audiences would like it as well.Ĭhina is definitely a distinct market, and not all games that succeed in the west are also successful in the east, but we had done our research and we knew that Chinese gamers enjoyed fast-paced, high-fidelity action games, so we expected that Kill Shot Bravo would fit right in.Īnother factor, of course, was our partnership with Cheetah Mobile. Vlad Ceraldi: A lot of it has to do with the fact that the game is simply a lot of fun, with universal appeal. : To what do you attribute Kill Shot Bravo's early success in China? To learn more about the firm's approach to China, and how it plans to boost Kill Shot Bravo back up the charts, reached out to Vlad Ceraldi, Director of Development at Hothead Games. However, it was short-lived - the game has since suffered a drop-off in the Chinese charts.īut how did it manage it in the first place, and how has it had to adapt to the Chinese market? This is no mean feat, and one achieved very rarely by western studios. Vancouver-based studio Hothead Games, with the help of Chinese publishing partner Cheetah Mobile, recently saw its mobile FPS Kill Shot Bravo hit #5 in the Chinese App Store's free games chart.
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