Penetrating Japan’s Social Gaming Market: A Culture-Centric Approach
The Japanese cell phone market has always been tough to crack, boasting a large number of feature phone manufacturers and a unique phone feature set. Consequently, foreign-made phone apps have traditionally been at a complete loss. With the recent success of iOS and Android phones, though, the social game market seems to be opening up ($3.6 billion in 2011).
The good news is that non-Japanese social game developers can enter the lucrative Japanese market, selling via the Apple Store and Google Play being a relatively easy point of entry. The downside is that the app and the website needs to be accessible to Japanese who do not speak English, thus entailing revision of the program interface to enable Japanese characters.
There are some game genres unique to Japan. These include:
- Manga and anime spin offs. This genre is a goldmine of intellectual property from which anime and manga producers – and copyright owners – use and extend for marketability.
- Social role-playing games. These games are not like other social MMORPG, in that the games may be text- and turn-based, like LARP but on a cell phone.
- Social and love simulation games. These may be mistaken for social dating and love simulation games, which are a different genre altogether. These are more popular among girls and young adults.
- Social idol games and talent contest games. These are games where you train a character contestant for competition to become an idol or star.
- Social collectible card games. These are akin to Magic the Gathering card games.
These genres are practically non-existent outside of Japan and thus essentially study for would-be market entrance. Foreign software developers also need to have a good and stable infrastructure to host the social services, as Japanese customers will be especially unforgiving of downtime.
An alternative to penetrating the market would be to partner with a social network application provider. The top three social network application providers (MIXI, DeNA and GREE) have at least 15 million users. In contrast, Facebook Japan has only 1 million gamers. Partnering with a Japanese game provider means they will serve as the billing and collection agent. The service provider’s internal synergies would also promote the new game and devise a sound monetization model.
Getting into the Japanese social game market means revisions must be made to make a program more culturally acceptable. Choosing the right hosting partner and game translation service is also necessary. Partnering with an established social game service provider is important to make use of their existing infrastructure. In lieu of an established game, creating a social game within a niche Japanese genre, from scratch, might be a better option rather than simply migrating an already successful game based on Western models.
Importantly, foreign game developers have to be truly immersed in the culture and use that to their advantage.
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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.
