In March, Yoozoo set up a subsidiary in Pune, India.
"We made this decision because we recognize that the big population base and booming mobile industry [in India] will bring about ample development space for potential mobile games," Yoozoo's vice president Liu Wanqin told the Global Times on Monday. "Now it's time to break into that market, nurture user habits and set up brand reputation."
She also noted that Yoozoo's first online gambling card game in India Teen Patti is quite popular among local users.
Big fortune ahead?
Yoozoo's overseas revenues stood at 1.268 billion yuan ($189 million) in 2016, up 64.55 percent year-on-year, said Liu.
As its products were welcomed mostly by U.S. players, Veewo said it now gains about 60 percent of the company's income from overseas markets.
Yeung bets that the proportion is expected to become even larger in the future.
Chinese game developers' revenues in overseas markets surged by about 130 percent year-on-year in the first six months of 2017, according to a report published by domestic news site yicai.com on July 31.
Moreover, according to Liu from Yoozoo, Chinese developers currently account for about 27 percent of all game revenues generated in Southeast Asia, and about 33 percent in the Middle East and Russia.
However, in an interview with the Global Times, Wesley Bao, CEO of Shanghai-based game developing start-up Coconut Island Games, said that overseas markets are not bonanzas for all Chinese game developers.
Coconut, which used to mainly target overseas users, has moved its focus back to the domestic market because it found that it is costly to meet the cultural needs of both domestic and overseas players with just one game, Bao told the Global Times on Monday.
Liu admitted that competition in the overseas market is also fierce and "you need to address hurdles like language and cultural differences" while exploring opportunities abroad.
Localization is the key
In the view of domestic developers, the key to success in overseas markets is localization.
Localization is not about translation, but about understanding local cultures, said Yeung.
For example, "you can't promote Christmas-related games in Arab countries and you can't say 'blondy' in U.S. games as the term might be considered offensive there," he explained.
According to Wang from Cheetah Mobile, Japanese game users are adapting slowly, so it's hard for games to explode in Japan, but in South Korea and the U.S., players easily accept new things, therefore innovative games can become a hit right away there.
"For developers that want to succeed overseas, they should pay attention to the changes on those countries' games lists and research on those hot games to find the market gaps. They should also conduct fast online surveys to see whether their games suit the tastes of local players," Wang suggested.
He noted that English-speaking countries have a lot in common in culture, religion and language, so they can be treated as one homogenous market, "but other countries need to be treated one by one."
