There are now over 15 million Steam users based in China (according to SteamSpy). That makes it the country with the third largest number of Steam account holders, behind only Russia and the USA. Numbers like that should be enough to convince any game developer to make efforts to appeal to the Chinese audience. Yet many don’t.

The problem is that a lot of Western developers don’t know how to attract Chinese players to their games. Sure, having a Chinese translation opens the door to one of the biggest PC game markets in the world, but that’s only the start. If you really want a game to become a hit among the Chinese audience on Steam then you’ll need to embed yourself further into that culture.

In chatting with experts on the tastes and behavior of Chinese PC gamers, it becomes clear that to make the most of this lucrative market, you’ll need to consider a game’s genre, character design, and art style. Beyond that, there’s marketing to consider: where should you promote your game, should you pay for coverage, or perhaps work with a specialist publisher? These are all questions that have multiple answers. You should find the one that suits your goal and budget if you keep on reading.

A lucrative opportunity...but for how long?

Time might be running out for devs to figure out how to make the most of the open potential of Steam’s Chinese audience, as it may soon close up. For now, Steam is in a unique position in that the Chinese government allows it to operate without the restrictions it imposes on other overseas PC game markets available in the country.

“Steam currently operates in a grey area in China,” says Daniel Ahmad, an analyst at Niko Partners. He's one of many observers who speculate that this is due to an agreement between the Chinese government and Perfect World, who publish DOTA 2 and Counter Strike: Global Offensive on Steam in China. “This means that Chinese gamers have access to all the games on the Steam library, many of which would be blocked or censored if they were officially released on a different platform.”

Perfect World's website

The hefty censorship of the Chinese government is something Microsoft came up against recently when releasing Gears of War 4 on the Chinese Windows 10 store. The game was deemed too violent by China’s Ministry of Culture, and therefore had to be removed from sale. But get this: every entry in the Grand Theft Auto series met the same fate, yet Grand Theft Auto V is being sold without restriction to Chinese players on Steam. In fact, China has the second largest number of owners of Grand Theft Auto V on Steam.

But this could all change at any moment.
 
“It is worth keeping in mind that the Chinese government could very easily impose restrictions and regulations on Steam in China at any time. This could make it harder for games to be published on the platform and many games could be banned from being sold in China,” says Ahmad. “Right now, these restrictions are not in place and so Steam remains an opportunity for many indie and larger publishers to target the niche of gamers in China who are willing to pay upfront for games.”

Surprise sales

This opportunity is one that a few indie game developers learned about in the best way possible. One of them is Adriaan de Jongh, the creator of visual puzzle game Hidden Folks, which unexpectedly sold 41 percent of its total units on Steam to Chinese players, making up 30 percent of the game’s total revenue on the platform.

De Jongh didn’t do any marketing for Hidden Folks towards its Chinese audience, but he did have the game translated into traditional and simplified Chinese. Other than that, he can’t explain how the game attracted such a big audience in China. 

Hidden Folks sales broken down by region

“Someone mentioned that there are not a lot of games on Steam translated to Chinese, relative to games in English,” de Jongh says. “Based on this, his theory was that when a game comes out on Steam that is translated to Chinese, there is a whole audience just waiting for it, and you're 'one of the few' to come out in Chinese at that time.”

De Jongh has since discovered that Hidden Folks has been streamed by some Chinese players on Twitch, and speculates that this may have contributed to its sales on Steam. But beyond that he is clueless. “I know there are platforms similar to Twitch in China, like Douyu,” says de Jongh, “but I wouldn't know how to navigate these platforms, let alone search or monitor them for activity on my game.”

Also caught by surprise sales on Steam coming from China was Mike Hergaarden of Dutch studio M2H. Their multiplayer party game Marooners has generated 18 percent of its revenue from China, selling 3205 units so far on Steam, which is 24 percent of total units sold. 

Hergaarden and his team have been trying to figure out what exactly it is about Marooners that Chinese players were attracted to. It wasn’t any of the marketing text, as the Steam store page was in English only, but it was listed as having a Chinese translation available, which is something it has in common with Hidden Folks.

However, Hergaarden notes that Marooners’ initial Chinese translation wasn’t ideal. “I was bored one evening before the official launch, and on a hunch, I used Fiverr for a simple Chinese translation,” he says. The result was a robot-like translation of the game’s few text passages into Chinese. At least, that’s how the people in a Chinese forum thread described how it reads.

Hergaarden discovered the forum after the game’s launch and subsequent influx of sales in China. “That’s when we had the Chinese translation done professionally and added several extra localizations for the game, and now also including the store page (Chinese, Korean, Thai, Japanese),” Hergaarden says. 

Other than being listed as having a Chinese version available, Hergaarden thinks Marooners may have appeal in China as its “characters and art style match the culture so well. They are quite ‘cute’,” he says. That would at least explain why M2H’s other Steam games, like WW1 shooter Verdun and car stunt game Crash Drive 2 haven’t done anywhere near as well in China. 

Dos and don'ts of translations for a Chinese audience

It’s clear from these two examples that having a Chinese version available on Steam can be important for a game’s sales. But as Hergaarden demonstrated with the cheap translation of Marooners there is a right way and a wrong way to do it. 

Brandy Wu, who is the Overseas Business Developer at Chinese game developer Xindong, notes that Chinese text is a must if you want your game to sell in China. But she adds that Chinese audio isn’t a must, for interesting reasons. 

Xindong's Vitality Idol Season

“Chinese core gamers have been playing English and Japanese games for years. Not only are they able to understand the language (we learn English from age 7, and Japanese language has shared characters with Chinese) but they also love the original voiceover,” Wu says. “Just like we don’t like to watch Hollywood movies with Chinese voiceovers. It just loses its flavor.”

Ryan Sumo, the Business Developer at Philippines-based studio Squeaky Wheel, says that having Chinese text is non-negotiable if you want a smaller game to have appeal in China. But he also adds a further detail: “[There’s an] important distinction between Simplified and Traditional Chinese. If you want to target mainland Chinese, do Simplified, because that's what mainland Chinese gamers are used to.” If you opt to add traditional Chinese then you also open the game up to players in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau, and the Philippines, though these are significantly smaller markets than the one in mainland China. 

Iain Garner, the Director of Global Developer Relations and Marketing at Another Indie, a publisher that specializes in bringing games to Chinese players, adds another important note. “The most important thing is making sure whoever is localizing your game is doing so via context rather than an Excel file,” Garner says. “Too many games are being localized by non-gamers, and the results are jarring.” The problem with a translator working from an Excel document is that they miss the context the lines are delivered within. Context can sometimes demand small tweaks to the language to flow better. Without it you risk the translator accidentally making a conversation sound robotic.

Another Indie's game Lost Castle

Garner is also in support of adding Chinese voice acting to a game as, in his experience, it’s “a great way to gain attention and Chinese consumers appreciate the extra effort.” Luis Wong of of Chinese game publisher Indienova agrees with what Garner says about voice acting, but adds a caveat: “if the quality is not good enough, that might be worse than not having it at all.”

Your options when it comes to getting a Chinese translation of a game are split in two. Either you can partner up with a publisher who will handle the translation for you, as well as localization and marketing. Or you can find an individual or agency who will typically only demand a single payment to translate the game. (Read on for tips on how to pursue the latter option.)

Knowing what the Chinese audience wants

There’s a conventional wisdom forming that simply having Chinese text available for a Steam game instantly opens it up to the Chinese audience. But the more you talk to those who are clued in on how the Chinese PC market works, the more it becomes clear that there’s much more to it than that. 

Firstly, not all games are created equal, and as with any other regional market of players, the Chinese audience has a particular taste. Ahmad, the analyst at Niko Partners, says that the majority of Chinese players still prefer MMOs, MMORPGs, and MOBAs, especially if they use a free-to-play pricing model. After all, Valve opened up Steam to China back in 2013 purely to sell DOTA 2 there. That means many of the Chinese players that have joined Steam since have done so just to play that one game. But they may possibly be open to trying out games similar to it.

Iain Garner from Another Indie has more to add to that line of thought. “Roguelike and roguelite games seem to be doing exceptionally well in China, likely due to the replay value,” Garner says. “Chinese players prefer Asian-style artistry and games that have cute little "chibi" characters (like Lost Castle) or other anime aesthetics (like ICEY) seem to perform better than pixel art games, which many Chinese gamers find off putting."

Luis Wong of Indienova concurs that games with anime-style art prove the most popular among Chinese players. “But games with a unique art style like Monument Valley or Hidden Folks also got a lot of attention because of their visuals,” according to Wong. Yuan adds that the Western cartoon style, as seen in TV series like Futurama and Family Guy is actively disliked by Chinese audiences. 

Another key factor to a game’s success in China is having an online component: “Local co-op is not a gaming tradition here so online co-op is a must,” says Garner. He isn’t the only person to emphasize the importance of competition in games for Chinese players. Yuan Zeng, who has previously reported on China’s PC game market and been a business developer at a Chinese game studio, adds that competition is an especially important part of Chinese culture, and this spills into the games the population prefers to play.

Yuan says that due to this cultural mindset, Chinese players are most attracted to online games with PvP elements, but notes that the diverse catalog of games available on Steam seems to also have broadened their tastes. “I think the new growth area is open-world survival battleground games (H1Z1, PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS, and maybe Escape from Tarkov).” 

Some of IndieNova's Steam titles