Making games in Qatar: How a small team built a company in an unlikely place | Hacker News Reader

Making games in Qatar: How a small team built a company in an unlikely place

polygon.com

28 pointscpeterso6 comments

There's game companies doing very profitably whose basic business model is - localization. [1] Word games work easiest for this case.

Localizing international game is also a non-trivial task (especially from western to asian markets), but it can easily lead to ten-folding your profits. [2] [3]

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Fugo

[2] http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/HenryFong/20130423/191019/And...

[3] http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/HenryFong/20130717/196436/Saf...

The 3rd article touches on this saying that there is more to localisation than just translation, but one of the hardest parts of localisation is how you actually charge people for your content. The issue is more than just a few places like China, outside of the main Western countries a lot of people don't have credit cards or don't want to associate them with their app store account.

"As an example Fortumo elaborates there are four times more mobile phones in the world than credit cards and in countries like Brazil, Russia, India and China, credit card ownership is as low as 15%." [1]

One of the best ways (at least for the user) is operator billing, using this the charge is deducted from the user's prepay balance (or added to their postpay bill, but again contracts are uncommon outside Western countries). If they need to buy more Farmville stars they can just go to a shop and top up their phone. Google supports this on a limited number of operators, but even in places like the UK where operator billing is quite mature, they only support it on one. Companies like Fortumo are doing better, but there are still a lot of local payment options missed by this.

As much as companies such as PayPal like to say they are the solution for global payments, the problem isn't solved yet.

[1] http://www.arcticstartup.com/2014/03/25/fortumo-opens-fund-o...

Just unrelated addendum to Fortumo - they enable developers from countries where Google Merchant account is not available to charge for in-app purchases on Play Store.

We'll be using it in two of our upcoming games.

This doesn't surprise me, much. We were approached by officials from Qatar for an SaaS of sorts, and we learned all about their culture or perhaps, more specifically, their funding. There's so much money in Qatar and so much of it being spent on putting them on the map, a nationalistic software push was bound to happen eventually.

I live in flyover country and I'd argue it's easier to form and maintain a team of engineers in another country than here. In other countries, the talent can't get to better locales for immigration reasons, leaving them stuck on whatever team they're on. In flyover country, there's a constant lure of your hard-trained talent to the tech hubs.

The game’s pretty shit though.

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