Tencent’s lessons from expanding overseas

The secret to successfully taking games into overseas markets boils down to one thing, according to Tencent marketing manager Man Zhou – understand the locals better than they understand themselves.

In a detailed description of how Tencent went about making Chinese games popular in Japan, Man points out that many key lessons in trying to grab a share of the global games market – estimated to be worth some $180 billion in 2020 – have come from getting things wrong in the past. 

Her conclusion is that a product can't be popular in a new market without accurate local insights, steady content marketing, and a carefully planned final release.

Three keys for success:

• Have an efficient international team, able to make use of localization insights, and “overcome the obstacles of time and space”.
• True insights into players comes from “thinking about and doing what players tell you they want”.
• Don’t focus only on big publishing platforms, but also on smaller and medium-sized ones, as these can offer incremental gains.

Key quote

“Both Chinese and foreign games share the same goal when trying to enter one anothers' markets: to maintain deep localisation insights into the publishing trends and statistics of the region they are targeting and to be more local than the locals.” Man Zhou, marketing manager of the global publishing department's product centre at Tencent Interactive Entertainment Group

Sourced from Games Industry