I was interviewed by a game industry publication called Game Sauce a few weeks ago about developing for the Chinese market. As the iOS and Android smartphone markets explode in China (and the Asian region in general), more and more developers around the world are investing resources into targeting this market.
What people are realizing is that it’s a difficult one to crack for linguistic and cultural reasons. Western companies targeting China in 2013 face a very similar set of problems as companies targeting Japan in the 1990’s – put simply, these countries are culturally insular. A common belief is that cultural differences between China and the West are related to China’s development, but I don’t think this is necessarily the case. Again, Japan serves as a good example as we’ve seen globally-dominant services like Facebook have greater difficulty gaining traction in Japan than anywhere else. Success in China for foreign developers more often than not requires direct cooperation with on-the-ground Chinese people to bridge the cultural and linguistic divide.
Check out the interview here: