China copied Draw Something, just as you expected.

Everybody is copying this game as far as I'm concerned. I remember playing it like 10 years ago.

The portal(s) were owned by Saunalahti, a Finnish mobile Operator. Their Jippii portals very very popular in some parts of Europe.

Unfortunately they don't exist anymore.

Don't you think Draw Something would have caught on if it had a chinese version ?

This is also the exact same reasons why chinese products don't really catch on in the west. Their approach is so chinese, with an insane mixture of colors, tons of features (note how the web tends to go Apple-style: all simple) and more often than not bad english, that they're doomed from the start on this market.

This is exactly the reason I am in china right now. To learn what it takes. In my opinion, all companies that care about this market should have offices here, put their pride aside and prepare to change the local face of their product to match the chinese style. Just compare weibo with twitter or fb, baidu with google, etc... It's so obvious what the chinese elements are, you just need to learn to use them.