Yesterday the CEO of DeNA China, Wang Yong, announced during his speech at the 2011 China Mobile Developers Conference that the Mobage (pronounced Mo-ba-ge) iOS Chinese platform has just launched.

He didn’t reveal much else but I managed to learn more after interviewing a DeNA staffer who was manning the booth. We got in touch with DeNA Japan yesterday but they didn’t have much information to tell us about its activity in China.

According to the DeNA China representative I spoke to, the Mobage Android platform was first launched in August this year, which was followed by yesterday’s Chinese iOS platform launch. Mobage China now has about 20+ localized mobile games on its platform. And the most popular game in Mobage China? She says it’s Ninja Royale.

The Kaito Royale Strategy in China

Some of you might know that DeNA’s other popular game title — Kaito Royale — will soon have its own TV series. And that, as I understood, is part of DeNA’s strategy to promote the Mobage brand in China. Sounds like they’re already doing what Rovio wants to do in the near future with animations and movies.

The DeNA China staff also told me that there are a lot of Japanese drama lovers in China. And most of them actually get to watch these Japanese drama series online for free. So with Kaito Royale turning into a TV series, that may help more Chinese (who love Japanese drama) to get in touch with the Mobage brand and eventually play its games.

DeNA China is focused on reaching out to Chinese who love all things Japan first and I thought that’s a pretty smart move. DeNA seems to be pushing the Mobage brand hard in China and is forming quite a huge local team to do exactly that.

DeNA’s Shanghai’s office has about 160 staffers and is also looking to set up bases in Beijing and Guangzhou. Meanwhile, DeNA’s main competitor GREE has partnered with Tencent for the China market. Of course, there is also Papaya Mobile which has over 30 million users in China and the U.S. It recently also received investment from DCM’s A-Fund.

Mobage worldwide - A snapshot from a brochure we received from DeNA China

The panel (L-R): EA's Mike Pagano, GeaxGame's Fox Jiang, Tapjoy's Larry Berkin, J-Seed's Ryo Umezawa; and host Richard Robinson.

This article is part of our coverage of the 2011 China Mobile Developers Conference.

Just before lunch, a panel of local and international mobile gaming experts chatted onstage here at 2011CMDC, both to discuss localisation of game apps, and to offer practical advice to the many Chinese app developers in the audience.

The host was Richard Robinson (of Youlu.com, and whom we saw earlier in the week at Disrupt Beijing), and the panel was made up of TapJoy’s Larry Berkin, GeaxGame’s Fox Jiang, EA’s Mike Pagano, and J-Seed Ventures’ Ryo Umezawa.

They discussed a couple of main issues, before then taking some audience questions. First up, Richard asked…

Topic: What’s your deal in China and Asia?

Mike, from EA - Currently, EA has four gaming titles localized for China, with a further “two more games on tap for this fiscal year.” Mike emphasized how its China team is truly run by local staff: “The talent here is amazing.” Plus, he says, its Ghost Harvest title – a kooky mix of farming and Plants Versus Zombies – was particularly aimed at China when being developed.

Fox, from GeaxGame - His company develops for sixteen countries, and is currently “focusing on Android.” An example is its Poker King Online Texas Hold’em.

Larry, from TapJoy - “We have an engine to put into apps to promote other apps,” says Larry by way of introduction. Right now, 10,000 to 15,000 games are enabled in this way, giving his network a “daily reach of 50 million people.” Pointing in Mike’s direction, he says that EA’s Ghost harvest utilises TapJoy, and that it was a critical part of that game’s growth.

Ryo, for J-Seed Ventures - Looking at the larger picture, Ryo points out how Asia – and especially Japan – is such a massive draw for game developers. DeNA, apparently, has a “30-times higher output than Zynga, fifteen-times more than Facebook.”

Topic: What are the challenges in making a global game?

Mike - Speaking for EA, he says, “We have to create a title that dabbles in eastern influences” to make it appealing in Asia, and that his company needs to focus more on the freemium model for this region. Giving a hat-tip to local social media, he says:

Games on Renren, Tencent, etc., are light years ahead of what we see on Facebook.

His advice in addressing these challenges to Chinese game devs is to get your game checked to make sure everything is fine for a western audience, especially in terms of language to ensure that nothing is accidentally offensive. He suggests hiring a foreigner for this. In terms of picking an attractive game to localize, he advises looking at trends in overseas app markets, to see what’s hot right now.

Fox - For GeaxGame, its approach was to pick a very straight-forward game – i.e. poker – to take to other countries. So, despite no overseas staff at his company, they’ve had huge success with it.

Larry - Emphasising the huge importance of promotion, the TapJoy man recommends local developers to purchase ad campaigns that require payment only when they work.

Ryo - Taking a different advertising angle, Ryo suggests effectively buying ranking through ad spaces. Though not cheap, he says that a title can get tens of millions of downloads in Japan “by spending 10 million yen” (US%126,000). In a second line of attack, Ryo suggests Chinese devs not overlook the importance of getting good reviews on app/gaming review sites.

EA's man got chatty with the Beijing audience after the panel event finished.

Audience question: How best to make your app/game compatible with various platforms?

Mike - At EA, he says, they use a few different technologies for porting games, “some are home-grown [solutions] and some are licensed deals.” But for Chinese developers, he admits they need a “develop once, publish everywhere” approach, and that that’s best started within the initial app, such as with, he says, “a modular solution” to building that allows for the plug-and-play of some elements. So, in essence, think about porting before you even make the original game, to save yourself stress.

Audience question: I have a [Chinese] game dev company with 50 staff, four game titles, and a local team. What move to make next to take a game global?

Ryo - “Pick a simple game,” he says, which is echoed later by Larry. Plus, Ryo adds, never forget to fail to translate all text, even down to the last menu item, if you want users to recommend the game to their friends.

Larry - Getting in a quick plug for his own company, he suggests TapJoy for its pay-per-performance promotion engine, as it represents a great investment with no wastage.

Mike - Lastly, he recommends to the female audience member to “bring in a focus group” so as to help “culturalize” the game that she hopes to launch in other markets. Giving an example, he cites EA’s own Need for Speed mobile game, which they decided to make more social in China. And so, going in the opposite direction, he recommends game developers in China to take out elements which won’t make sense overseas:

Tone down crazy UIs; or what looks like clutter to a US audience.

After all that advice and debate, the panel members mingled with the audience here in Beijing to swap business cards and to field more queries. Hit the comments section if you have any further game localisation ideas.

This article is part of our coverage of the 2011 China Mobile Developers Conference.

Here at the 2011 China Mobile Developers Conference panel on LBS (Location-Based Services) and Ecommerce, moderator Jin kicked off with a question: has the LBS + e-commerce combination arrived too early in China?

Wang Jiang, CEO for Hangban Guanjia took the mic and said he is confident that it isn’t too early. He smartly pointed an example: Hotel Finder, an app developed by Ikamobile which helps users find/book hotels based on location. Wang said that Hotel Finder has already started making money, and then handed the mic off to Liu Zhangbo, the founder of Ikamobile, who was also on the discussion panel.

Liu Zhangbo says that the use of LBS depends largely on the industry. Hotel booking makes sense because people like to know how far the hotel is from wherever they’re planning to go, be it a conference location or a tourist attraction.

Wu Yihong, CEO of Vpon Mobile Advertisement, says while working with big brands like Starbucks and McDonald’s for LBS coupons, he has noticed that there is a strong need to educate the public about LBS. Instead of spending time developing the promo codes and strategy, he realized that a huge chunk of time is spent on educating consumers.

“Education” seems to be a problem faced by Vpon only as Li Haorong, Jiepang’s strategic officer says that Jiepang achieved huge growth thanks to its good timing. “We are lucky because since last year we realized that most people are very comfortable with smartphones and are using services like Weibo and Foursquare. So Jiepang, a check-in network built for the Chinese community, quickly picked up [users],” he said

The moderator pressed further on e-commerce, asking: “So you guys aren’t working on e-commerce?”

Li said that there are a lot of things that LBS can do and they can’t possibly work on everything. But on e-commerce, Jiepang plans to partner with sites like Yihaodian.

[See also: Our interview with David Liu, founder of Jiepang.]

Zhou Hang, CEO of Yongche.com, is a no bullshit panelist and my favorite among the rest. He questioned the moderator — ‘Do you mean it’s too early to start or too early for rewards?’

The moderator smiled and the audience clapped because Zhou was right: the question was vaguely constructed.

Zhou moved on to cement his point, “If you believe in LBS is the future, you should work on it right now.” He points to Ikamobile as an example. He says that if Ikamobile hadn’t started dabbling into LBS in 2008, it would never have been able to make Hotel Finder a success. “If we’re talking about harvesting LBS rewards, then yes, we’re too early.”

(I found it interesting that Hotel Finder seems to be the only LBS success, both in terms of user growth and revenue, which they can mention.)

Zhou also added an insightful note. He feels that consumers are happy to buy via their PCs. “You really need a hardcore shopper to shop on mobile Internet,” he said. “And most giant e-commerce websites are easily ported over to mobile. Zhou says that the value of LBS isn’t e-commerce, but service.

Zhou also hates group buying because it doesn’t bring much benefit and sustainability to merchants. It focuses on low prices which is good for consumers but not exactly good for merchants. And because prices are driven so low, merchants can be forced to compromise on the product quality.

“Group-buy sites are the lower class of the IT industry,” he said.

Hahahaha! That’s a wrap folks!

The9 (NASDAQ:NCTY) is a China-based gaming giant that provides SDKs for game developers to leverage its plug-and-play social gaming solution, Game Zone. Shen Guo Ding, vice director and manager of The9′s Mobile Internet business, says that there are many problems in the mobile gaming ecosystem in China. One of the largest problems is that gamers in China are so used to downloading free games online. Gaming companies can’t monetize based on pay-per-download, but Shen still sees opportunities.

It’s simple — Free games usually attract more gamers which in turn makes the game more fun; the more the merrier. And with more gamers on board, developers can construct the in-game business model to ensure that the game is fun and yet able to be monetized by selling virtual goods. Shen shared three ways to motivate games to buy virutal items in-game:

• PK and leaderboards: Gamers who PK (i.e., fight against other players) want to win. And to win, most gamers wouldn’t mind spending a dollar or two to buy better equipment. While winning is a major push for folks to buy virtual goods, the gamers’ desire to look good is also another motivation that triggers buying of virtual goods. Winning in style is a good phrase to sum up this point.
• Make gamers “chase/wait for” something: This point is pretty clear if we use Farmville as an illustration. Farmers often have to wait for hours or even days to harvest a money-making crop. The wait is frustrating and gamers often find themselves buying tokens to speed up the harvest. The same principle can also be applied to mobile games.
• Making games social: Shen admitted that this point is basic but still felt the need to emphasize it. He says that the key to making a game social is by making it a default destination whenever a gamer logs on to his PC. The actual gameplay should attract a gamer, as should the friends who he/she has met in the game. Some quick tips Shen gave were to add a chat room within the game and also make sharing available to other social platforms like Weibo.

Previously, we have also covered how The9 has helped Tomb of Qin – a game made by China’s Dragon Team Interactive – to hit 500,000 downloads across all of its outlets in China.

via CSND Mobile

This article is part of our coverage of the 2011 China Mobile Developers Conference.

What do developers want from Baidu? Money, traffic, data, and APIs, said Wang Jin, Baidu’s Assistant-director of Technology at CMDC.

Wang showed the audience a lot of statistics very fast. So fast, in fact, I that I couldn’t write fast enough to keep up with all of it. But we did learn that Baidu has lots of data about how Chinese use the internet. For example, it was revealed that 91 percent of mobile users still use 2G to get online. Chinese mobile users listen to music on their phones during lunchtime, and shop on them later in the afternoon. They use tablets at night. Interestingly, both old and young Chinese are using weibo on their mobiles pretty much constantly from day to night!

The message that Wang was emphasizing is that that the company has the data to help developers understand the market, so they can better build a product that fills a need. He added that Baidu provides a bunch of APIs for developers to explore and leverage.

With regards to making money, Baidu has an army of advertisers at the ready to help developers monetize their apps and mobile sites which has generated about 1 billion RMB of revenue for third party developers so far.

Baidu presented some awesome statistics, which I hope I can track down later and really look into further. We’ll try to get in touch with Baidu and see what we can do.

Lei Jun at CMDC 2011

Lei Jun is far more energetic today than at Disrupt Beijing. Time is running short at China Mobile Developer Conference (CMDC) and he is cutting the bullshit, throwing away his slides, and speaking straight from his heart very passionately.

Diving straight into innovation, Lei Jun says that innovative entrepreneurship is about building and creating something that someone else hasn’t done. Copying isn’t part of success and that received a loud round of applause. Lei Jun says that only folks who can really bear the risk of creating what hasn’t been created are true entrepreneurs. A copycat can’t really consider himself an entrepreneur.

He also threw out a series of questions — Can we embrace failures in our society? Can we cheer for companies when they fail? His point, I believe, was to spur Chinese entrepreneurs to take more risk to create meaningful new enterprises.

At Disrupt, Lei Jun stated that Google’s lack of expertise in hardware was the main cause of its Nexus phone failure. He said that the comment has caused quite a stir on Weibo. Particularly when he himself doesn’t have a huge background in hardware. But he reaffirmed that he is trying his best to create a phone based on Internet services for China.