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Comment by xiaoma | Hacker News Reader

This ignores the elephant in the room: international competition. Top western games such as World of Warcraft have done extremely well in China without having to rewrite the stories or change their artwork.

A huge issue is that the Chinese gaming companies are accustomed to very little international competition for Chinese themed games and in the last five years or so, limited competition at all. It's similar to how Youku thrived in China (especially after YouTube got blocked) but can't compete internationally. Winning in China and successfully entering a market where US and Japanese game companies are unrestrained are two very different challenges.

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> This ignores the elephant in the room: international competition.

I would attribute most of the difference to this, but I would go further in that there just aren't that many successful international games period.

Any game which requires language for cooperation is a non-starter. So, you either have to be individually based or competition.

Most of the really successful ones are individual: Angry Birds, Candy Crush, Clash of Clans, Puzzles and Dragons.

Some competition ones do exist: Hearthstone, Clash Royale, Words with Friends. However, you have a bootstrapping issue for competition--how do you have competitions until you have competitors and vice versa?

I would say Counter-Strike (especially GO with it's matchmaking) is a good example of a successful international game. It was not uncommon to have Chinese, Russians, Japanese, Koreans, etc. on the same server. A lot of people have learned a few words from other languages like "thanks" or "fuck you". There is some basic coordination of tactics too because the goals in the game are "A" and "B", or asking a teammate to buy a weapon for you, a "drop".

> I would attribute most of the difference to this, but I would go further in that there just aren't that many successful international games period.

LoL, WoW, Hearthstone, DotA 2 are some of the most popular games and they're popular world-wide, not just in the US and they're competitive games. DotA 2, for example, has servers for different regions so at least the language barrier issue is not as bad.

Bootstrapping is not an issue when you have good marketing, because you can have a large "launch" that people were waiting for. Maybe a single-player mode is useful to bring in people who are not confident in their skills as well.

> Any game which requires language for cooperation is a non-starter.

Some games have a fixed set of messages/soundbites which is enough for some basic coordination, which then can be translated in all client languages. Sure, for high-level play you often will want voice chat, but it works for normal online games.

And of course very basic English can go a long way in text chats.

Some players are fine with a community that only consists of the devs themselves playing a few hours a day.

Wasn't the whole Pandaria region/race blatant pandering to the Chinese market?

Except it was popular over there already before Pandaria was even released. I'd warrant that it would have continued to be popular if Pandaria wasn't released.

> or change their artwork.

Not true!

See:

https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/49x7m0/chinese_wow_cen...

That's very minor and IIRC occurred after they had already made a fortune in China.

There were political hurdles and that's why Blizzard partnered with The9, but the market was satisfied enough with the art assets to spend gobs on WoW.

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