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KEY HIGHLIGHTS

🤔How apps should begin thinking about international expansion.

🙇Many developers tend to overthink internationalization by considering local partners when typically Western channels with local inventory can be the best place to begin.

🙋How a developer should prioritize among the 200+ countries they could be localizing in – and what their first steps should be. 

📋Why getting an iOS app to be approved to be live in China can often take 100-200 pages of paperwork.

🌀Why the foreign developer approval process in China is almost humorously complex.

🎫The regulation change that will kick in on July 1.

📉Why the number of companies releasing foreign games in China has declined over time.

😐Why does China make it so hard to publish an app?

😓There is significant consolidation in Android app stores in China – yet there are challenges in operating here.

🔨How featuring works in the Android stores in China.

🕹Some examples of games that have transitioned well to the Chinese market.

🤷‍♂️What might happen after July 1, after which you have to have a licence to be on iOS in China.

KEY QUOTES

The case for starting with what you know

One of the things I see companies do of all sizes, is try to think about all the different markets in the world when they’re building their game and trying to make a game that will resonate everywhere, which is in my perspective, sort of impossible to do. 

I think in the end, there are some games that do resonate globally, but that was never the intention. My feedback is always focus on building the game for the audience that you understand best – if that’s your local market or targeting a specific user or a certain type of gameplay, focus on that, get that working really well and then you can start to think about how you expand internationally.

One small step to going global

For the smaller developer, the best and most accessible first step and maybe only step is to translate the game. Make sure it’s for markets where they don’t speak English or whatever your main primary language is; make sure it’s localized and localize the apps or pages. 

Why China remains an untapped market for game developers

If you look at the top grossing games, you look at the top public companies in mobile gaming, most of them do nothing in China, because it’s just too complicated to deal with. Even though it’s the biggest market in the world, they just don’t want to deal with the hassle. 

In terms of the process, in the last couple of years, the government basically said that every game that is released in China needs to have a ISBN, which is essentially a license code, a license to be live. So, as part of that process in the recent past, the amount of information that you have to submit is quite significant. So on the one side, the volume of information is very high. So even printing out the source code of your game.

Bureaucratic red tape can be interminable

You submit everything, they review it, they’re like: no, there’s still an English word in here, you can’t have any English words; or oh there’s a skeleton that’s taboo you can’t have that; or this is real blood or something. So, then there’s back and forth processes that just take forever, and then you’re waiting to go in the process. For a foreign developer, the other complexity is that you can’t actually even participate in this process.

Complexity and competition in China

I think the one thing I will say is that over time, the number of companies interested in publishing foreign games in China has declined. The market has become more competitive. The complexity of releasing any game has gone up. The market was always competitive – and then you throw in this crazy regulatory process, the bar has just increased, for those that still want these games because there’s the minimum effort is so high now to even release anything.

The games that make it big in China

The key takeaway is just having a realistic sort of perspective on the potential of your game in China, because people are like, oh, China, it’s the biggest market in the world. I’m gonna hold back and do all these complicated things, like talk to Tencent and Netease and whoever. And we’re going to have this crazy launch and do all this stuff and the reality is that that’s for 0.1% of games.

FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW:

Shamanth: I’m very excited to welcome Josh Burns, the founder at DigitalDevConnect to the Mobile User Acquisition Show. Josh, very excited to have you.

Josh: Awesome. Yeah. Excited to be here. Thanks for including me.

Shamanth: Indeed. I feel like we’ve crossed paths so often for many years. And you’re certainly somebody who’s held in so much regard by so many people I know just because you’ve helped so many companies navigate and negotiate what can often appear to be somewhat murky, somewhat unclear, somewhat amorphous worlds that come in the broad term ambit of what one might call international expansion. 

You’ve really gone into the weeds, you really understood and helped a lot of companies attempting to negotiate and navigate international expansion. And that’s absolutely something I would love to dive into in much more depth and detail today with you. Josh to start off, what sort of developers is international expansion even right for? Should everybody be looking at it? How do you recommend developers start thinking about it or evaluating this at all?

Josh: Yeah, so from my perspective, if we were to focus on the gaming vertical, I think, everyone can do something. It’s really about the right timing.

One of the things I see companies do of all sizes, is try to think about all the different markets in the world when they’re building their game and trying to make a game that will resonate everywhere, which is in my perspective, sort of impossible to do. 

I think in the end, there are some games that do resonate globally, but that was never the intention. My feedback is always focus on building the game for the audience that you understand best – if that’s your local market or targeting a specific user or a certain type of gameplay, like focus on that, get that working really well and then you can sort of start to think about how do you kind of expand internationally.

But if your game isn’t essentially working in your core demographic or market of focus, like it’s never gonna be successful as you look to other markets that you are less aware of and understanding; it’s not suddenly magically going to perform better there or generate better returns.

Shamanth: Yeah. It makes sense if there’s a core game in a core market that’s doing well, because you obviously don’t want to scale something that’s not optimal, or not working efficiently in the core markets. And again, when you start thinking about going international, would it make sense to just do Facebook ads in all markets – or Google ads, Snap, the big ad networks in global markets, and just scaling the hell out of these? Is that enough for the vast majority of apps? How do you recommend thinking about a plug and play approach to internationalization?

Josh: Yeah.We’re talking about a very broad spectrum of developers who have different resources and capabilities.

For the smaller developer, the best and most accessible first step and maybe only step is to translate the game. Make sure it’s for markets where they don’t speak English or whatever your main primary language is, make sure it’s localized and localizing the apps or pages.

To me, that’s the entry point to test what the potential is in these markets. And then when you’re looking at maybe a developer with more resources with capabilities to do marketing or scaling their game through performance marketing, I think, a lot of times people kind of like, overcomplicate things. 

So they think, “Oh, I’m taking my game to these markets, Japan or Korea or these international markets, I need to figure out like, how do people market games there, what are they doing, like some local performance channels or even other types of market activities.” 

But the reality is, I think the initial step should always be leveraging what you already understand and what you’re good at, so if you’re focused on North America and Western Europe, and you’re using Facebook, Google, Snap, Unity, AppLovin and etc, all the stuff that’s super familiar, you have relationships there that are self serve, you understand how to run campaigns, all of those channels are generally going to have inventory in these countries. And so, that’s your starting point, right, like, start running campaigns there, if it’s even using the same creatives and localizing them. In my perspective until you saturate those channels, which, like realistically, 95% of developers never will, gaming developers just because of their scale and stuff like this. These companies have a huge amount of impressions and inventory in these countries. 

Until you reach that point, you don’t need to focus on these local channels in my experience. In these markets all of these local networks are not self serve, have huge high minimum budgets, they operate more like traditional marketing sources where you have to talk to someone and it’s all it can be like incredibly time consuming. And in the end, it might be a waste of time anyway even to try and test these things. So, in my perspective the bottom line is like, if you want to explore performance in these foreign markets, like almost everywhere, with some exceptions, like all the channels and partners that you work with now, will be able to make very meaningful inroads in the market.

Shamanth: Gotcha. So it sounds like the lowest hanging fruit are always the international scaled channels. And let’s assume a developer wants to take things to the next level, and they really want to localize, culturalize the game, because just localizing the marketing, just targeting their marketing is only going to take them so far. Let’s assume they want to take things to the next level. And then they essentially look at the world. And each Asian market is so very different. Culturally, of course, also in terms of monetization potential, purchasing power as well. And you couldn’t just say: let’s go international and just run one single campaign or just work with one single partner. So presumably, each market requires very different approaches, very different strategies. Also, because just the revenue size in some of these markets are so humongous.

Josh: Yeah. 

Shamanth: So, let’s assume that’s a developer with a single game. They’ve tested some of the big marketing channels and are like, right, we think this is strong, LTV is strong, ROAS is there from the big marketing channels – now we really want to localize. Where do you think they should start, in terms of evaluating any of the 200 countries they could be localizing for? I’m assuming the answer is probably going to differ by genre and game, but typically, how do you recommend they think about this?

Josh: Yeah. I think the first part is really just to do more research on the different markets. So it’s obviously likely for your game that there’s similar products, similar games out there in the market. So looking into the key markets so you could say start with the top countries by revenue. So in there you have Japan, South Korea, China, are in there which are all very different and very complex. 

But you from there, you can go in and look – like if I have a word game, probably not a lot of opportunity. If I have a RPG game, maybe there’s opportunity, but it’s also very competitive, but I think just looking at the charts, seeing what other genres are doing so that are similar to your game, are people ranking into the top charts in terms of grossing – even super far down the top 200-300 grossing, that gives you at least some directional information to say like: okay, well I can narrow these down, I can start from 10 and narrow down to five countries because all these countries that have different complexities between them that impact the game, so you have very developed countries like Japan and Korea, and then you have regions like Southeast Asia where games like Fortnite or whatever which are very popular, most people have low end Android phones, you can’t play the game. Or maybe your game has a huge download size. It’s 800 megabytes and people have limited data, they’re not going to download that. 

Shamanth: Yeah.

Josh: And there’s payment issues, network constraints. Another thing to look at is sort of the general interest in foreign games: if you’re in the market for us, that would be our content. So if you look at markets, like in Southeast Asia, like Singapore, Philippines, like a lot of Western games are very popular. Whereas you look at Japan especially as you basically have all local games from local companies, that pretty much dominate. 

So this is kind of stuff that there’s a lot of information available online from different companies like using the app store intelligence rankings. And just some of them, even market intelligence companies publish a lot of data around what are the biggest countries, and then just using that to help, kind of narrow down the pool of all the countries to ones that you think would be the most relevant. 

And then I think, from there, it’s really like, starting with basic stuff, like I said, even the smallest developer can likely localize their game and then localize their app store page, and you’re gonna get some organic traffic: maybe it’s very small, and let’s see how that performs. Like on a per user basis, is it compelling, does it compare with what you’re seeing in your core market, so I think it will help prioritize, but like you said, it’s gonna be different for everyone based on the type of game they have as well as their own scale and resources.

Shamanth: Yeah. And that makes sense, because there’s so much competitive intelligence already out there. Even if you don’t subscribe to a lot of these tools, just look at the apps to see who’s doing well, look at the revenue potential – it certainly makes sense to zero in on the top couple of markets, see what the absolute charts look like, and go from that to see what the biggest opportunities could be. And of course, speaking of opportunities, and this is funny, I was reading this article, basically, they had this stack of 100 pages of documentation. They’re like, this is our iOS submission to the regulatory authorities about why we should be allowed to operate in China. I don’t know if that still is the process to get approved, but I’m curious what’s in this 100 page stack, 200 page stack and why is that important?

Josh: Yeah, I think China in itself – it’s always been very complicated and only has become much, much worse in terms of complexity.

If you look at the top grossing games, you look at the top public companies in mobile gaming, most of them do nothing in China, because it’s just too complicated to deal with. Even though it’s the biggest market in the world, they just don’t want to deal with the hassle. So yeah, in terms of the process, basically, in the last couple of years, the government basically said that every game that is released in China needs to have a ISBN, which is essentially a license code, a license to be live. So, as part of that process in the recent past, basically, the amount of information that you have to submit is quite significant. So on the one side, the volume of information is very high. So even printing out the source code of your game. 

Shamanth: Wow. Okay.

Josh: And that’s why these huge stacks of papers, but basically, like, you have to have an overview of like, the tutorial and what’s the first user experience. And early on, you actually had to, like, load the game on to a phone and like, put it with your submission, like, on the actual device. So the process itself is like, almost humorously complex, but the other side of it makes it even more of a challenge is like, for a while, there’s like different governing entities that like had: we’re sort of fighting to like control the process and the process is very fluid. So you’re kind of like it wasn’t even clear what information you’re supposed to submit and it was like, always changing. That’s like stabilizing more, the reality is it’s very time consuming and what that means is that it essentially increases the barrier of entry. 

Shamanth: Yeah.

Josh: You have three perspectives- one you have to go through the process,

You submit everything, they review it, they’re like – no, there’s still an English word in here, you can’t have any English words, or oh there’s a skeleton that’s like taboo, you can’t have that or this is real blood or something. So, then there’s like back and forth processes that just take forever, and then you’re waiting to go in the process. For a foreign developer, the other complexity is that you can’t actually even participate in this process. So the only companies that can actually submit a game are local Chinese companies. If you’re not like the majority owned by Chinese citizens or a majority Chinese entity and you can’t even participate in this process. 

Shamanth: Okay. 

Josh: And then the other one is basically, for a long time it was frozen. And that was for everyone. 

Shamanth: Yeah. 

Josh: So, that actually hurt a lot of smaller companies in China who are building games for Chinese audiences because they had no way to release their games. And so they actually started focusing a lot on the foreign markets. The bottom line is like, the process is time consuming and complicated, but you can’t even participate in it anyway. You have to work with a partner. 

So, I think we’ll touch on this, that it was announced recently is basically, so there was a requirement but basically that with the iOS store and with Steam from the PC games side: it was a gray area where it wasn’t enforced. So it was still a place where you could release your games. Anyone could release games that were available to Chinese audiences – like they were supposed to have the code, but they didnt. And for iOS this is something that’s supposedly changing starting July 1. So it’s been talked about a little bit, but to me, I think it actually could be a huge problem for a lot of companies in the middle tier. Like I said, at the top tier, they are too risk averse to release their game in China, because they’re a public company. They don’t really like very visible but if you’re kind of in the top 100-300, grossing like, China might be 5, 10,15, 20% of your revenue. 

Shamanth: Yeah.

Josh: And theoretically, nobody knows exactly what’s going to happen when that disappears overnight. So people are trying to figure out is it only going to be for new games? Is it gonna be for everyone, what would be the process? You wake up and the game is gone.

Shamanth: So that sounds like a very byzantine process. You said the only way to make it work is to have a local partner. And I know quite a few Chinese companies have invested in western games, Tencent for sure comes to mind. If you had to find a partner, is that like a traditional model of a publishing deal where you just have a deal, they do the submissions, they take a rev share from whatever they do in China. Is that typically how it works? 

Josh: Yeah, so historically, if we think about the Chinese publisher model for mobile games, it’s usually based on like a revenue share. Usually there’s some type of minimum guarantee where they essentially pay you some amount upfront that they recoup from. And then

early on, like, they would basically take the source code of the game and do all the work. So they would take the source code, make some changes to make it more appealing to Chinese audience, maybe they change the in app purchase price points, maybe they had some local content that’s interesting. 

And then they push it out into the Android channels, they push it on iOS, and do marketing, different types of marketing. So that was early on, I think over time that’s a lot of work – so companies some shifted to more of like a focus on just distribution. So they’ve pushed on the developer to make some changes and maybe integrate some of the SDKs of these Android stores and the partner would focus on the promotion part because that means a little bit less risk to them. So I think one thing that’s unknown is kind of this, “I’m a developer, I have a game that’s been live since 2016, on iOS, and it’s making a few million dollars a year in China, but now I need the ISBN code, I need to work with somebody there. I don’t really need them to do anything besides secure this code. But I need them. I need someone to do that.” 

So I don’t know what that model will be like, I’ve seen this licensing thing has been around for a while, but it never was really of concern. People were doing some sort of service model, or it’s kind of like a monthly fee and this kind of thing. So I don’t know exactly what’s gonna happen. I know a lot of the companies there are suddenly more interested in working with Western companies because they know that the Western companies can be forced to work with them and there’s plenty of games making a lot of money that will need their help. So those are the kinds of models that exist right now. 

I think the one thing I will say is that over time, the number of companies interested in publishing foreign games in China has declined. The market has become more competitive. The complexity of releasing any game has gone up. The market was always competitive – and then you throw in this crazy regulatory process, the bar has just increased, for those that still want these games because there’s the minimum effort is so high now to even release anything. 

Very particularly, say three to four years ago, there’s all these different companies and every game would find someone to work with and launch out so that’s one of the challenges right now as I work with and help different sorts of foreign companies is this: the level of the rigor is incredibly high, just the level of effort at a very minimum to release a game in China.

Shamanth: Wow. Yeah. And out of curiosity, and maybe this is more about geopolitics than game development: why do you think they make it so hard? Is it that they just want to favor local developers? Is it just bureaucratic ineptness? What do you think it is?

Josh: I think there’s definitely some sort of political motivation. And obviously, censorship is a huge thing.

Shamanth: Right.

Josh: There’s sort of different aspects, I think the bureaucracy added just this level of complexity where there’s sort of different groups sort of jockeying over who is the natural owner of the process. I just added complexity because no one was really sure what was happening. 

There’s censorship has always been a huge thing. And frankly, probably one of one of the large drivers is basically making sure that the content is appropriate. I think it isn’t necessarily that foreign developers cause the problem necessarily. People building games in-market in China that have the gambling elements, which aren’t allowed, and they weren’t like social casino games where they effectively were with just a more accessible looking front end, but they’re basically gambling games. 

There are some, like inappropriate content, but it’s really just like controlling that. I think there is some sort of favoritism to local companies, but the reality is when we talk about it, when they shut down the process, even if you’re Tencent you couldn’t release any games. There wasn’t sort of like a backdoor sort of loophole where “Oh, I’m so and so. I’m going to get through.” 

And it was actually like, debilitating to the sort of middle and long tail developers right, because they were essentially unable to release any game. So and these are Chinese companies. So I don’t think it was totally motivated to sort of: but if you look at the games that are approved now there’s a tension with Korea and there hasn’t been a Korean game approved in the last couple of years. And obviously Korea has like hugely popular games that would be hugely popular in China, but there’s that aspect too. I think. Some people look at it as like, why isnt the US doing something about it? Because, like, I say, what happens is all the games are like screw China, we’re gonna focus on the US.

Shamanth: Yeah.

Joah: It’s like open season and there’s not like a requirement. So those are some of the some of the factors. But it is very complex.

Shamanth: Sure. This is helpful for a lot of people listening because when they encounter a lot of these hurdles, I think sometimes the answer for them is: “maybe this requires a diplomatic solution at the White House level – and not talking to Tencent”.

Josh: I’m actually surprised that this iOS loophole has been open for so long, frankly, because of the level of rigor they’ve had in the Android side. So it’s not surprising to me that it happened. But like all these things you just talked about? This is why if I’m Zynga, or Glu, the reality is a lot of their games aren’t relevant to Chinese audiences.

They don’t even bother like, if you look at a lot of the public companies. They’re just like no, that it’s not even EA for the most part. They don’t even bother with these markets, because there’s so much downside risk, and also complexity. That is just something they just like sort of steered clear of.

Shamanth: Yeah. And of course, we haven’t yet talked about Android, which, again, is a completely different type of labyrinth in and of itself. But I understand that there are dozens of Android stores, and again, to the best of my understanding, you had to go to these witth local partners just as well. So do you have the exact same set of regulations? What are the key hurdles if you had to get an Android game out in China? How does that differ from what you talked about with iOS?

Josh: Yeah, so the licensing part is basically the same so that your license is sort of for the game, and that will be leveraged then on any platform. So Android, the licensing requirements have been in place for a long time. There are a couple Android channels, it’s sort of flouted these requirements, then they got the crackdown from the government. They had like sanctions where they were sort of shut down from generating revenue for a while. So on Android effectively you’ve had to have the license code for the last few years. 

And again, that means you have to work with a local partner if you’re a foreign company. The good news on the Android side is like, if you talk about it, like three or four years ago, there were people who would always say, oh, there’s hundreds of Android channels, this kind of stuff. The only good news is like there’s been a lot of consolidation. So a lot of the even bigger ones have consolidated together and a lot of those sort of mid to long tail ones are not really relevant. 

So growing complexity aside, it’s more manageable. It’s still a huge pain, and that’s why frankly, you work with a local partner, each of these channels as a different SDK, there’s no English documentation. The documentation is not very good anyway. So a lot of these publishers have technology where you essentially – in layman’s terms, like insert the binary and it spits out like that 20-40 different versions you need, because when you are updating the app, obviously, you need one for each of the stores, so it spits it all out and sort of like, handles a lot of that process. 

The other key from the partner side is we think of Google Play and Apple. There the reality is, yeah, sure, a lot of the biggest games get featured because they have high profile stuff, but they actually give a lot of visibility to like smaller developers. On the Android side, in China, it’s very business driven in terms of visibility. So basically, like you want to work with that partner because the partner has to be able to understand and be like, “Hey they have a track record, they bring games that generate revenue.” And that’s for the most part, historically, what they focus on is like, “I’m gonna give you visibility in my android channel, because you’re gonna generate me revenue.” 

Shamanth: Right.

Josh: And so if you’re coming from this it’s that kind of focus. It’s less about your curation and this kind of stuff. So that’s why you really need the partner as well to navigate it. So there’s kind of the operational part as well as the relationship part is key for the other side.

Shamanth: Yeah. And when you say, talk about having a local partner. Let’s assume this is sort of a mid tier developer who wants to find a partner. Should they fly into Shanghai? Should they actually send emails to business development folks? Should they talk to somebody? Like, where do they begin?

Josh: Great question. The irony of this question is like, a lot of my work is helping people navigate this process, both based on just knowing the right people and knowing who’s show up. Reality is like, for 80 percent or maybe even more of developers, like, there’s not so many opportunities for you, and you should actually just do stuff on your own. Well, I guess that’s what I would have told you before July 1. I would have just said like, look for China, just localize your game into simplified Chinese traditional Chinese to cover Taiwan and Hong Kong, get on iOS, localize the app store and call it a day. Or you can do UA on iOS with different methods. 

But from a publisher perspective, the harsh reality is like I said, the bar is very high, there’s just not gonna be a lot of opportunities for folks. What I see is that people do a lot is they hold back their game from being available in China on iOS because they think they’re gonna work with Tencent or Netease or something. And then they miss opportunities where their games are new – they actually do feature a lot of Western games and on iOS and China. Or they have you sort of like, pipe dream kind of ideas and the reality is there’s not huge opportunity for them. So this would have been what I would say up until July – we’ll see what happens but basically I just kind of like for the majority of folks, you should just release the game, push it live and on iOS in China and do the minimal amount you can. 

For those that are operating at a larger scale and have very high potential products, and there are folks looking for indie games that want to bring different things to China, even premium games – but the opportunity is not huge. Yeah, I mean, the reality is a lot of these folks are at the events, they’re coming to the Western market. You can find a lot online in terms of different companies and reach out to them. They’re very responsive. Well, they’re generally like, pretty responsive. But I think

The key takeaway is just having a realistic sort of perspective on the potential of your game in China, because people are like, oh, China, it’s the biggest market in the world. Like, I’m gonna hold back and do all these complicated things and talk to like Tencent and Netease and whoever. And we’re going to have this like crazy launch and do all this kind of stuff and the reality is like, that’s for like the 0.1% of games.

So, it’s not just the 0.1% that have the opportunity to work with a publisher but it’s just a small number of games and unfortunately, I think the changes starting in July will kind of eliminate most opportunities. And my hope is that there’s some model that can be found that’s in between, like a publisher and self publishing or doing nothing where you can kind of get the license. 

Shamanth: Yeah.

Josh: It’s as frictionless as possible and like, you can get the game out and do something interesting. Yeah. But that remains to be seen, honestly. So I’m always happy to look at people’s games and just give them this realistic feedback about it, but I think the key is just be realistic about it.

Shamanth: Yeah.

Josh: Because the reality is there’s not a lot of huge opportunity for working with partners for most people. 

Shamanth: Interesting. Yeah. And it’s easy to lose sight of things – and just looking at everything in China as a monolithic thing. Are there examples of games that have done this well that you can think of?

Josh: Yeah, I mean, most of the ones that have been very successful have had like very deep partnerships. If you look at games like Subway Surfers that was able to reach like a very large scale in China, but there’s a ton of effort dedicated to adding custom content and custom events. So, if you think about like Chinese mobile gaming, like early on saying 2013 or 2014, most of the very popular games were Western games, because there wasn’t a ton of innovation or anything really interesting being developed in China. 

So that was the heyday of crossborder publishing – like the Fruit Ninja, Cut the Rope like Subway Surfers, these kind of things, which got to like massive scale. That nowadays, that’s like, pretty difficult. You see it with maybe some of the Supercell games, which have managed to be very successful but otherwise these days it is very difficult. And that’s why I think the publishers are more cautious and I’m encouraging people to take a very like methodical approach to try and do what they can. 

If you do the localization in the game and the App Store and you can do some local marketing, maybe you can hire a person that can be engaged with the community of Chinese players, be on WeChat and answering questions oh, then we can add some custom content for Chinese New Year. 

So it’s like a slowly increasing complexity and then you can hopefully grow the revenues and stuff of your game. Again, this is before the July 1 kind of situation. So that’s where things are at, a lot of these games – if you look at the top grossing charts in China on iOS, you don’t see very many non Chinese games, let alone non Asian Games. And that just speaks to the challenge of the market that’s dominated by the Tencent, Netease and then some sort of other large players really like controlling the market. So, yeah, unfortunately, not a lot to point to recently, that’s the top end of the market opportunity. 

Shamanth: Indeed but maybe I missed this, what happens on July 1, again?

Josh: So June 30th is the date where basically after which you have the license to be on iOS in China. 

Shamanth: Right. 

Josh: Nobody knows exactly what happens on July 1st which is the day after – does everything disappear? I don’t know.

Shamanth: Okay.

Josh: If you look at say, Korea, and there’s on iOS, the social casino category doesn’t exist, or if I look at in Korea for social casino on Google Play, it’s a bunch of like, random local games, because they have to be licensed. So you can kind of see like, what potentially it could look like, right. Just all local stuff. I don’t know.

Shamanth: Yeah. Will find out, I think this has been a great reality check. And I think the vast majority people don’t quite appreciate the complexity of exactly what it takes. And as you pointed out, this sort of expansion into China is really for the top 0.1%. Josh, this has been incredibly insightful. Even for myself, just because this is something I just barely knew, sort of at a very surface level.

Josh: Yeah. 

Shamanth: Thank you so much for being on the show and giving us the inside scoop on all things international, all things China specifically. This is perhaps a good time to wrap, and as we wrap, could you tell our listeners how they can find out more about you and the work you do?

Josh: Yeah. For sure. So you can go to my website, which we can share afterwards, digitaldevconnect.com. look me up on LinkedIn, you can reach out to me through the website. Always happy to answer questions, from anyone, maybe it can take a while for me to get back to you, but always happy to provide feedback. And kind of love talking to people working on different cool stuff in gaming as well as in other verticals as well. So yeah, thanks for having me. I hope people can learn a little bit about it. I always try to be positive but also realistic. Because I think what I see is, you get somebody that’s a Chinese publisher, and they’re gonna be like, “Oh you have to come to China. It’s the biggest market” and then people like spin their wheels and waste a bunch of time where they can be doing other things with that time and effort. 

Shamanth: Thank you again for being on the show. Excited to put this out to the world very soon.

Josh: Cool. Thank you.

A REQUEST BEFORE YOU GO

I have a very important favor to ask, which as those of you who know me know I don’t do often. If you get any pleasure or inspiration from this episode, could you PLEASE leave a review on your favorite podcasting platform – be it iTunes, Overcast, Spotify or wherever you get your podcast fix. This podcast is very much a labor of love – and each episode takes many many hours to put together. When you write a review, it will not only be a great deal of encouragement to us, but it will also support getting the word out about the Mobile User Acquisition Show.

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Thank you – and I look forward to seeing you with the next episode!