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What is South East Asia Market to the Game Industry?


The South East Asia Game Industry is an unique one as we say, because developers and publishers will need to deal with a multi-cultural audience that makes it much more challenging to penetrate into the market. And if you do it right, the reward is seemingly huge as well.

We’ve talked with several developers and publishers on the obstacles they face trying to penetrate into this market, hence we’ve put up 10 top tips for developers in hope to help them venture into this vibrant market to gain more for their quality content.


Tip No.1: Localize the Game Payment and Payment Channels


By now, if you’ve tried to venture into this market and failed at it, you should have notice that the main problem is the payment selections available. South East Asia is known to have very low credit card penetration, and if you’re used to putting your content on mainstream platform that only support credit card payment, you’re not getting the actual metrics of how huge the market is.

Third party payment solution is the kings and queens when it comes to the South East Asia market, that’s why veteran developers whom has their fair share of publishing their content in South East Asia would give you advice such as getting a local publisher to do the publishing for you to save all hassle. But in fact, there’s a new alternative for you, which will be shared in the next part of the tip.

So your next question would be, what is exactly third party payments?

Third party payments are basically payment channels such as e-banking, mobile top up cards, prepaid cards, etc and believe it or not these are exactly how users in South East Asia pay for their games. However, because each and every country in South East Asia has their own third party payment solution, if you want to reach out to all the users, you’ll need to painstakingly integrate with each and every one of them to make sure that none is left out, and to do this, it’ll take you more than a year to finally have to piece everything together.


Tip No.2: Ask the Local Folks!


Now, looking at how much hassle it is to integrate the payment yourself, you will most probably panicked once you find out that, that’s not the only thing you need to worry about. When you’re dealing with such a diverse group of audience, localization and local marketing becomes an important role as well. Hence the easy way out would be, work with local partners for a more effective game publishing experience.

Tip No.3: Localization is Key!


To effectively speak to your users/audience/player, you’ll need to speak their language, and when it comes to South East Asia, that’s a challenge because we are not unified by one single language. Get ready to localize your game into at least 5 languages, which constitute of languages such as English, Mandarin, Bahasa Indonesia, Thai, Vietnamese etc. To speak in the player’s native language, will give them a sense of familiarity and it is much easier for them to stick to the game and for them to promote their game on behalf of you to their friends. To put it simply, players would like to play a game that they understand and they will most likely share it with their gamer friends who wish to understand the game as well.

To find out what are the rest of the tips, stay Tuned for Part 2 next week!