Picking an appropriate price and monetization strategies for the culture is also an important step to combat China's other major issue: piracy.
As long as gaming has been in the mainstream, piracy and plagiarism of video games has been an ongoing issue around the world, but especially in China. There are many theories as to why the region is flooded with pirated and bootlegged copies of games, but the spark that really ignited video game piracy in China was the gap between the price of licensed software and the purchasing power of the Chinese people, or rather, lack thereof. For close to $15, Chinese consumers could purchase a licensed game while a pirated version of the same game would cost significantly cheaper.
Even though the living wage standard has since risen, which makes purchasing pirated or bootlegged versions of games unnecessary, these very games are flooding the market. It’s actually more difficult to purchase a licensed, legal copy of a video game than it is a pirated copy in China, and that’s due to a number of factors. These factors include Chinese consumers being used to having a “free lunch” of sorts and are now unwilling to spend the extra money to purchase a licensed game. The fact that the Chinese government has yet to crack down on game piracy has also lead to its continued growth.
So what are game developers to do in order to attempt to wrangle the Chinese market to potentially have some kind of income in the region? It seems many of them have gone the way of freemium games, which just so happened to take off originally in South Korea when it originated from the late 90s. Since its introduction, free-to-play games have been more prevalent in China as consumers in the region have been cultivated to adopt it more so than purchasing licensed games.
Publishers in the region have reportedly made over $9 billion in sales using free-to-play models, according to research firm Niko Partners. Around 10% of that figure can be attested to the rise of mobile in the region, which apparently is a larger piece of the free-to-play pie. Niko Partners also reveals there are approximately 192 million mobile gamers in China, while only 150 million play on PC. The rise of mobile gaming comes as no surprise since the region banned video game consoles up until early 2014, where it was finally lifted, and production quality within mobile gaming has improved substantially.
Even though the number of mobile gamers has dwarfed PC gaming, making money from those players has been much harder than developers would have guessed considering the raw numbers. In an interview with BBC News last year, The9’s Chris Shen says this is because “Chinese users are very used to getting games for free. They are very well educated on how to get software and games for free.”
This sentiment seems to be the real issue behind piracy in China as it’s come up time and time again. Consumers in the region just don’t feel the need to purchase legitimate pieces of software if they have bootleg or pirated versions of the same software readily available wherever they go. The only way this issue could even attempt to be resolved is if something drastic happens to bootleggers and software pirates in the region to stop them from having the upperhand over legitimate software developers and publishers. Developers going the freemium angle certainly helps, but it’ll only be a matter of time until bootleggers and pirates are able to offer their customers the same, or at least similar experiences.
