Donald Tang – The CEO of APPTUTTi
Since the beginning of this year, the product shortage in the domestic mobile game market emerged and is becoming a major issue. Some manufacturers chose to go out to seek opportunities, while others have begun to dig overseas content providers and use overseas creative games to solve the immediate needs. In the early July, APPTUTTi had an interview with Sykong Media. APPTUTTi has attracted the attention of many insiders because of holding nearly 1,000 overseas creative games, After that, Sykong Media received a lot of comments, such as ISBN for the imported games, whether the domestic market is “unacceptable”, how overseas products perform in domestic market, and so on.
In response to these questions, Sykong contacted the CEO of APPTUTTi to learn more about the operation of APPTUTTi and their views on overseas creative games entering the domestic mobile game market.
APPTUTTi wants to be a “leader” in helping overseas App developers to launch their mobile games in the Chinese market
Different from domestic manufacturers flocking to overseas markets, in the past, few domestic teams focused on the work of introducing overseas games, let alone creative overseas games.
The entry of light games is limited by the team, ISBN and the localization. It is a big difficulty. However, APPTUTTi has not only run through this road across nearly 90 countries, but also successfully established partnerships with plenty of overseas content providers. Some of the creative overseas games launched have already performed well in the domestic market.
Such a “product millionaire” seems to have found the correct way for overseas mobile game products to enter the domestic market.
According to Donald Tang, the CEO of APPTUTTi, “The idea of signing up for overseas creative games started 3 years ago. At that time, some overseas games content providers were introduced to Chinese friends. In this process. It was found that due to cultural and logic differences, communication efficiency is very low, and business can’t take off.” Due to the high barriers to enter the overseas games into China, the idea of building overseas creative games and domestic distribution bridges has arisen.
Donald gave an example. “Eyes – The Horror Game” is a small game developed by one Polish couple. They work in the supermarket during the daytime and develop games at night as a hobbie. Currently “Eyes – The Horror Game” has got both over 10 million downloads on the App Store and Google play with lots of praise, when they have no chance to contact the Chinese players.”
“In terms of light games, there are many overseas small game content providers. If you don’t understand the overseas environment and culture, it is difficult to access to them, but in fact, the games they made are already ideal in the mainstream channel platform. In other words, the quality of these games is actually very good.”
Donald recalls, “The Chinese market 3 years ago was already a mobile game market of over 10 billion US dollars, accounting for nearly 30% of the global mobile game industry. By 2018, it will be formed into a supermarket with more than 23 billion US dollars. The Chinese market will have a lot of demand at the product level. Today, the domestic mobile game market has a product crisis, not only the phenomenon of skin-changing, but also the emergence of same product issued by the multiple publishers. Product shortage strengthened the way APPTUTTi introduced overseas creative game products. Donald believes that this field can make a difference.
APPTUTTi holds plenty of overseas creative games, puzzle games accounts for 45%
According to Donald, “We are cooperating with plenty of overseas content providers currently. They come from nearly 90 different countries, including Russia, India, the United States, Pakistan, Spain and other countries. Among them, Russian products temporarily occupy 20% share. In the Asia-Pacific region, large-scale games will be introduced in Japan and South Korea. Currently, cooperation agreements have been reached with some content provider parties in these two regions. We will establish teams in these two places, to communicate with the local content provider in local language and assists them to enter the Chinese market.”
When asked about APPTUTTi’s criteria for selecting overseas products, Donald said, “We welcome all types of apps and games, as long as they don’t infringe the Chinese law. These apps can’t include: pornography, violence, political sensitivity, etc.” In order to understand the game needs of domestic players, APPTUTTi interacts with DataEye, a third-party data service provider for mobile games. Through the data report, we can analyze the game preferences of domestic players, and even predict the types of products which will be scarce in the short term.
In terms of product types, APPTUTTi currently reserves plenty of products, and the distribution of categories is very close to that of Google play and Apple App Store. Among them, puzzle games accounts for a high proportion, reaching 45%. In addition, overseas products such as simulator games, action, shooting, education, racing, strategy, sports, card, role-playing, etc. which are equally popular in the domestic market can all be found in APPTUTTi.
The game “Blocky Cars” won the TOP1 of Huawei’s new tour download list in March, and broke through 1 million in the first week
In APPTUTTi’s product list, “Blocky Cars” is currently the best performing product in the domestic market. The pixel shooting game developed by the Russian manufacturer Fahrenheit Lab OOO and it has scored 5 million downloads in the first month of Google Play. So it accumulated a good reputation in overseas market.
“And our other game, Mad GunZ, has been scheduled for release by Y2Game this year , and the number of booking has reached more than 150,000. These data are quite surprising, which proves it was right that we chose to introduce overseas high end games to China.”
In addition to the product’s unique gameplay advantages, APPTUTTi also hopes to cooperate with outstanding domestic publishers on the basis of excellent creative products to combine into a greater role.
Establish a standardized model, link more overseas content provider to domestic publishers
“We have offices in Hong Kong, Singapore and Shenzhen. The team members are from Russia, Mexico, Colombia, Malaysia and other countries. I myself have more than 20 years’ multinational cooperation experience in IT industry.” This is a great foundation for APPTUTTi to explore creative games.
As an overseas content provider alliance platform, APPTUTTi cooperates with thousands of content providers and reserves thousands of products, and this number is still rising. Therefore, APPTUTTi has established a very standardized model. It works between overseas content provider and domestic publisher.
“We can establish a legally secure relationship with one app developer in just 5 minutes.”
“We can collect a product in just 30 minutes, all authorized.”
“We can operate 24/7.”
“These are all based on IT service management system and international team. We pay great attention to systematization, standardization and processed management. We have planned to adopt this system with more than 1000 domestic publisher partners in communication and product information sharing. We hope to accelerate the overseas games for our publisher partners, to reach different players in an efficient way.”
And these are the advantages that APPTUTTi has developed to the present, and it has not been done by other platforms yet. Whether cooperating with overseas content providers or communicating with domestic publishers, it is necessary to have sufficient understanding of the mobile game market of both parties, and APPTUTTi has successfully played such a role.
