The global gaming market has been dominated by the Asia Pacific region for years. In 2019, Southeast Asia generated game revenues of $4.4 billion, a growth of +16% compared to 2018. Around 70% of the market share is attributed to mobile gaming according to Newzoo.com.
In 2020, the gaming revenue from the Asia Pacific market alone will be up to $78.3 billion and is predicted to rise even more to over $174 billion by 2021 according to statista.com. This means that the Asia Pacific region holds a share of 49% of the global games market revenue in 2020. North America, for example, will only have a revenue of $40 billion in 2020 and Europe, Middle East, and Africa together only $35 billion. If you think this status quo can’t be threatened, you’re wrong. The Asian gaming industry has to cope with new players like Google, which launched their cloud-based gaming platform Stadia in November 2019, and Microsoft, which also plans to launch a game-streaming service on September 15th this year.
Cloud gaming, or the so-called “Netflix for games”, will allow people to stream games over the internet on their smartphones, tablets, or PCs. The big advantage of this model is that buying expensive consoles or gaming computers is no longer needed. Subscription-based models give players access to the games they want and enable them to play wherever they want.
Challenges for Southeast Asian gaming companies
Asian gaming companies now have the chance – but also the need – to expand to other markets than their already “owned” Asian markets.Markets like Europe and the U.S. which seemed far away before suddenly become very close. But how do you launch a new game developed in and for Southeast Asia in Europe and the U.S. as well? The biggest challenge is quite obvious: the language. How can you check your game for language issues when you don’t speak the language in question? Not only language but also different cultures may be a problem. Europe, the U.S., and Asia – the cultural differences are indisputable. Testing is essential at this point.
What happens most of the time is that game publishing companies do a soft launch in the Asian market as a first step and then a big launch in other markets a few months later. In these few months, they want to test and adapt the game for the desired region. This often leads to a struggle with deadlines because they can’t find the right testers and subsequently have less time for adjusting the game regarding language and localization.
Additionally, game testing is not something that can be done in a few minutes. Proper game testing easily adds up to 30-50 hours of pure gameplay. Therefore, it’s not only difficult to find testers for such a project but managing the test and the testers also requires a lot of time. This leads to the problem that most games are only tested with one or two testers right now. In turn, this means that changes in the games are often based on the opinion of one person – one single person!
That’s far from a representative opinion and puts companies in big risk of publishing a poor game that threatens their image and, consequentially, their brand. It definitely makes sense to get help from an expert. Not only can we find more than one tester for your game, but the testers we find will also match your desired target group. Furthermore, we can support you with writing test cases, setting up the test, and managing the testers.
The only thing we need to know is what you want to test and when. We take care of everything else and, at the end of the test, provide you with a final report including bugs, tester opinions, and hands-on recommendations to create a better game for the players in your desired market.
Make sure your product thrives in any location: localization testing
Localization is more than just translating your content into another language – you want your game to look and feel like it was created specifically for the needs of your target market. This doesn’t only cover content and grammar, but additionally and especially UI and tricky elements like date and time formats, or whether applications are loading successfully in locally different technical circumstances, such as different network speeds.
That way localization tests help you to ensure your game is adapted to the gamers from a certain region and to their very own culture. More info can be found on our localization testing page. Find out more about tests we already did for the gaming industry and watch our webinar with Qualitest: The Next Level of Game Testing
Are you interested and want to learn more about testing possibilities in the gaming industry now? We’re looking forward to your message and to helping you build a game your players will really love.
