How to Enter the Japanese Game Market
Japan remains a sturdy and voracious market for social game creators. But unlike Western countries, it focuses on mobile gaming across the whole spectrum: from regular and smart phones to portable consoles. Social gaming in Japan has thus grown into a dynamic, highly-competitive market buttressed by Nintendo, Sony, Capcom and Sega.
Over the years, a new breed of game developers emerged, causing social games to sweep across the web and mobile phones. Social gaming in Japan is led by the big three of Mixi, Gree, and Mobage-town, who are accessed by consumers using mobile phones rather than web browsers. Half the population of Japan lists social gaming among their past-times. This data is from Pikkle developer David Collier, who believes the Japanese market for social gaming is as huge as the American one.
M-create ranking revealed that as of August 2012, Nintendo continues to dominate the local gaming market with an allocation of 70 per cent. In hardware alone, Nintendo owns 75 per cent of the market, followed by Sony’s 23 per cent. Nintendo also owns the top 10 bestseller consoles: five 3Ds, four Wii, and one DS. Gree, on the other hand, shifts to feed the voracity of hardcore game players with a goal of bringing video game market to smartphones.
Entering the Japanese Social Gaming Market
Faced with such a promising market many game developers from the United States, Europe and neighboring Asia are expressing desires to enter social gaming in Japan, with many foreign firms already develop social games for the local market.
Translation of the game to Japanese is paramount, as locals tend to turn their backs on games with any foreign language. Culturalization is another factor. To make social games more attractive, developers structure contents to reflect real life scenarios in Japan, just as pioneering game developers did from the beginning. Given Japanese patriotism, new game developers should be mindful of appropriate game backdrops.
Uninterrupted and smooth game experience is also crucial. Imagine the scenario of hot gamers at the height of a game… obstructed by bugs! Such situations can turn them completely off. Debugging is an essential component of a social game. Before the game is launched in the market, it should be run-tested and reviewed for any error and incompatibility with devices.
Social gaming is similar to an online shop, a customer service or online banking. It should be running throughout the day, non-stop. Though this may not be difficult to achieve, it may have issues from time to time. Game developers understand servers need to be high-performance and capable of accommodating hundreds, if not thousands of gamers. A “must” feature of a social game is the online game support accessible any time by the game users, with inquiries responded to within 24 hours.
Needless to say, promotional events of new social games require significant capital. But with dynamic and multifunctional social networks in Japan, the expenses for advertisements have been reduced. Even huge promotional investments could pay off, given that Japan’s social game market yielded $3.4 billion profits in 2012.
The high standards required of social game developers are epitomized by the multi-million dollar film adaptations of Japanese epic games. Adaptations that awed the world.
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About the Guest Author:
Rodolfo Lentejas, Jr. is a fulltime freelance writer based in Toronto. He is the founder of the PostSckrippt, a growing online writing business dedicated to producing top quality, original and fresh content. To know more about him, please visit www.postsckrippt.ca. Like him on Facebook or follow him on Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest.
