How China Fell in Love with Fruit Ninja, the #2 smartphone game of all time?

May 17, 2013 Leave a comment

How China Fell in Love with Fruit Ninja

by KAI LUKOFF on 05/16/2013 · LEAVE A COMMENT

Fruit Ninja is the #2 smartphone game of all time, said Phil Larsen the CMO of Halfbrick Studios in an interview at the GMIC. So how did this slasher of satisfyingly squishy fruits move into China? For one, China is the only market in the world where Halfbrick does extensive internationalization. ”We’re not going to do a different version for Germany anytime soon,” says Larsen. But China’s both large enough (the second-largest market for the game) and different enough to justify the extra effort. The China-specific adaptations came in two steps: 1) monetization; and 2) new content. To enter China, Halfbrick turned to the publisher iDreamSky. CEO Jeff Lyndon told me that they spent the past year focused on adapting the monetization model of Fruit Ninja. To really thrive in China, the game required more than simple localization (translation, Chinese payment SDKs, Chinese game center). It also had to be internationalized–parts of the gaming experience had to be redesigned and rebuilt–for the China market.When the game was originally launched about three years ago, the paid download was still the way for developers to make money, so that’s how Halfbrick designed it. The pay-to-download software model, of course, sells just about as well in China as chicken feet sell in the US.

iDreamSky first tried creating a trial version: the user could play for free for three minutes before the game shut down. That worked better than the paid model, but piracy still flourished. Next, iDreamSky launched a free version with advertising support. That prompted a lot of customer complaints, so ads were scaled back to cross-promotions and ‘branded ads’ rather than the low-quality fare served up by most ad networks. Now the latest version finally in-app purchases, which has become by far the most popular monetization model worldwide, not just in China.

This year, iDreamSky have big plans to localize the content inside of Halfbrick games for China: they’re currently running a competition where fans can suggest new ideas for inclusion. Winning ideas will be presented to Halfbrick Studios for consideration, and, if approved, will be developed by iDreamSky’s China team. They’re currently considering adding a Grass Mud Horse (草泥马) into Jetpack Joyride as a vehicle.

Halfbrick has experimented in toys and licensing, but hasn’t achieved the same success as Rovio. The last China version of Fruit Ninja that I played linked to a store where you could buy watermelon and strawberry plush toys. But the Fruit Ninja game doesn’t have characters in the same way as Angry Birds.

While Rovio has renamed itself Rovio Entertainment, Halfbrick still considers itself a games company. Halfbrick wants to keep its team small and focused on its core competency: building great games. That’s why–unlike Rovio–it doesn’t do nearly as much in licensing and merchandising, and doesn’t have an office in China. ”Rovio has like 700 people and we have like 80. We want to preserve that special culture,” says Larsen.

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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