Li Haoyu, who returned to his office, couldn't calm down for a long time, and the first mobile game produced by his company was about to be launched, and he was a little excited. He picked up his mobile phone and clicked on a mobile game that has become very popular this year, which is also one of his ways to relieve stress, but as soon as he logged into the game, a full-screen large advertisement popped up: a scantily clad woman looked at you with provocative eyes, and then a line of words appeared, "The curtain general and Chang'e were violent and passionate in the bathroom all night, if you want to see it, order me to peep".

It's not enough to have an ad.,The problem is that this ad can't be canceled within fifteen seconds.,One point it pops up on the interface of the game download.。 Well, I'll put up with ads, I'm all making games, and I also need to make money when I know how to make games. Why did the game appear today for what was still a free game yesterday?,Resurrection once a dollar.,What ingots and gold coins also need money.,All the places that were originally free have become charged?

Li Haoyu found out after checking the Internet that the mobile game he was playing had been represented by a mobile game company in Huaxia, so there was an ad that popped up as soon as he entered the game, and the game store changed the originally free things to be paid to get them.

Li Haoyu is really speechless about these mobile game companies in Huaxia, and he is also worried about the mobile game market in Huaxia, if most of Huaxia's mobile games have become rampant with advertisements, and most of the props in the game need more money, then Huaxia's mobile game players will not play the game happily, but be played by the game.

"Xiaoyu, can you help me check the advertisements in Huaxia's mobile games and the games in the game store?" When encountering this kind of thing, it is naturally more reliable to let Xiaoyu go out, and it is too inefficient for him to search for those information from the vast network.

Xiao Yu smiled sweetly and said, "My dear master, please wait a while, I will find the information you want for you right away." ”

After a while, a pale green light curtain popped up in front of Li Haoyu's eyes, and a lot of information appeared in the light curtain. Li Haoyu didn't look at it, but he was almost not startled, it turned out that the water in the mobile game market was so deep, even deeper than the water in the terminal game market.

There is no doubt that the current Chinese mobile game market is in the ascendant, but there are not many mobile games that can be used by Huaxia mobile game companies, and many classic games are produced by foreign mobile game companies.

Because many players don't know English, Huaxia's mobile game company carried out the so-called "localization" after acting as an agent for these mobile games, which is actually a special version of Huaxia, and the game content is very different from that of foreign mobile games.

In the past two years, many foreign mobile games have successively provided official Chinese versions, and it is always a good thing for players to no longer have to wait for suspicious third-party Chinese versions. But if someone has played the original version before, these Chinese versions will most likely make them feel wrong - the picture seems to be rougher, the difficulty seems to be higher, there seem to be more in-app purchases, some UI interfaces have been subtly adjusted, the originally clean picture often has some unpleasant advertising bars, and even the content of the extreme game has changed dramatically.

Why does the Chinese version become a different game?

A few years ago, a media reported that the Chinese version of "Temple Run 2" represented by Ledou Games had a monthly turnover of more than 30 million in China, far exceeding the game's revenue in the European and American markets.

How did Temple Run 2 get to sell more than 30 million per month?

The Chinese version of Temple Run 2 is a free-to-play game, and you can find a "privilege pack" in the store that costs 4 yuan, which not only removes the ads, but also earns 5 diamonds and some in-game currency, which seems to be very affordable. But in fact, the original "Temple Run 2" is not only free, and there are no ads, only relying on in-app purchases to make money, and the Chinese version adds ads on the basis of retaining in-app purchases - or full-screen.

A mere 4 yuan may not bring much revenue, and advertising is mainly used for the promotion of the manufacturer's own products, and will not bring direct income. If the Chinese version does outperform foreign countries by a significant margin, it will clearly benefit from more in-depth localization changes:

1. The highest image quality of the Chinese version is only equivalent to the medium image quality of the original version, and the lower resolution material makes the installation package slim from 49MB to 29MB, which fully reduces the download and hardware threshold.

2. The original novice teaching is straight to the point, and it cuts into the main topic of parkour as soon as it comes up. In the Chinese version, you will first see the "Daily Login Bonus", and after receiving the reward, it will be imported to the character purchase interface, and the default choice is "Hot Female Anchor - Liu Yan" priced at 9 yuan...... Swipe right twice to see the free vanilla default characters, and that's when you get to the point.

3. The UI changes can best reflect the wisdom of the localization team, in the process of parkour, the Chinese version has added a row of shortcut buttons to the upper right of the screen to maximize the use of in-app purchase items. This position in the upper right corner is very subtle, it makes the field of view of the Chinese version inherently narrower than the English version, increasing the chance of the player hanging up.

4. When the player hangs up, the game will automatically enter the SMS payment interface, and you can send a 1 yuan SMS to resurrect with a single click. After the cancellation, the mall interface popped up again, tirelessly promoting gems.

The above are the localization strategies that Ledou has repeatedly announced to the public: "cultural adaptation", "payment point adjustment", "user behavior research" and "optimize the code, compress the game package, and the picture quality is almost the same".

A similar phenomenon abounds in many of the mobile games represented by Lotus, including the famous Fruit Ninja. The in-app purchase of the teaching is overwhelming, and the "Arcade Mode" and "Zen Mode" and "Multiplayer Game" that are free to open in the original version have all become locked, and they can only be unlocked by paying 6 yuan each. What's even more amazing is that Letao has added a resurrection function to cut fruit...... As long as you are willing to spend money, all scores are fine.

"Slimming" is a mainstream localization strategy. The reason is nothing more than "Chinese players' network speed is slow" and "Chinese players are more concerned about the size of the installation package". According to past experience, if the number of downloads of small games is large, everyone tends to press the package, and it has become a similar standardized requirement: if the developer's game is too large, the channel will indicate that there is a problem with the promotion.

Regardless of where this convention comes from, the reality is that slimming is often accompanied by a sacrifice in audio and visual quality, but due to the peculiarities of the mobile game market, mainstream audiences don't care about this detail at all. Only users who have played the original version will see the difference, but such users will not play the Chinese version of the later version, so this phenomenon has always been in the blind spot of the public.

In addition, there are many "localization" strategies often used by domestic agents, which can be simply summarized as "doing addition":

1. Add paid points to lock the originally free content and change it to a paid unlock. 2. Increase the difficulty of the game, 3. Add a lot of pop-up ads (usually full-screen ads), 4. Add more in-app items, 5. Increase the price of in-app items, 6. Add an offerwall, 7. Force the whole time online.

If the "slimming" of the installation package is to lower the download threshold as much as possible, then the above series of strategies is to give full play to the limit of product profitability without driving away the users who have been attracted.

In contrast to "addition" is "subtraction", where affiliates sometimes castrate content that they think Chinese players don't need, and how to determine what content is not needed — presumably including all that doesn't generate direct revenue. For example, "DJMAX (DJMAXRAY), which was released not long ago, deleted the original built-in music player; The Chinese version of the mobile game of the same name of "Frozen" unexpectedly deleted the horizontal UI of the English version, resulting in the game interface not being able to change with gravity sensing.

Perhaps from the perspective of the localization team, the last thing Chinese players need is the so-called "user experience", and it is enough to maintain the game at a "minimum playable level". Guided by this idea, they even removed the automatic health regeneration function of "Shadow Gun".

Shadow Gun is a third-person shooter mobile game released in 2011 in the style of Gears of War. Because of its excellent picture, it has been widely used to test the performance of mobile phones, and has frequently appeared in many mobile phone evaluations, and it is also familiar in China.

The Chinese version of "Shadow Gun" has removed the automatic health regeneration, which may be a bit abstract to understand: as a comparison, you can make up for what it is like to be beaten like a dog when playing Call of Duty, only to hide in cover only to find that the screen is always blood-red - this change basically destroys the foundation of "Shadow Gun" cover shooting, and the combat difficulty has increased dramatically, so we saw the intimate health kit in the mall - it only sells for 8 cents!

In fact, removing the automatic blood return is not the biggest misfortune of the Chinese version. What's even more unfortunate is the fact that even though the "localization" team has done so much work and almost changed the game to the bottom, it still doesn't have the entire plot of the Chinese version of the story, and the cutscenes are still with English subtitles to this day - which once again proves that the "user experience" of Chinese players is the most insignificant.

In August 2012, Mr. Fang Zhihang, CEO of Youdaoyi, published an article on the famous developer community Gamasutra: "5thingseverymobilegamedevelopershouldknowaboutChineseplayers". In the article, he "revealed" this information to foreign developers:

Chinese people don't like to buy games, but they like to spend in games and spend generously. Wise designers will take advantage of this mentality of the chemistry gamer, making it easy for players to show off what they paid for in the game - for example, a virtual buff game that players can showcase.

Li Haoyu couldn't help but want to drop the mobile phone out of the box when he saw this, his focus was not in this area before, he really didn't expect that today's mobile game industry has been muddy to such a point, blatantly modifying the original game for money, and forming an unspoken rule of the industry.

"I'm going to change that!" Li Haoyu said secretly.