作者：Jeff Grubb

日本用户对手机游戏的投入水平超过其他市场，但这并不意味着你就有必要针对该市场本土化自己的产品。

Kantan Games分析师Serkan Toto在本周的Casual Connect Asia大会上指出，人们很容易因为看到一些数据就误以为开发者应该面向日本市场发布游戏。他在演讲中分享了开发者进军日本市场须知的事项和建议。他称海外开发者要在这个市场实现收益并没有想象中那么容易。

他称“日本是世界上最难攻破的手机游戏市场之一。”

日本玩家每月在手机游戏IAP中的平均投入（ARPPU）约65美元。这是个相当惊人的数据，但通常情况下，开发者如果在日本发布西方游戏可能甚至无法从中分得一杯羹。这个市场的用户偏爱日本制造而非海外产品，游戏领域尤其如此。

Toto表示，“我同一些大型游戏公司交流的时候，总会发现他们过于自信。而我总是试图让他们了解日本用户的想法就是‘你以为自己是谁啊？我们才不在乎你在美国或欧洲有多大名气。’”

日本传统主机游戏市场也同样如此，在2001至2003年，日本前100名榜单中的游戏清一色是本土产品，海外制造的电子游戏无一上榜。

但即使是日本制造的游戏，也并未能在应用市场顺利实现大笔收益。多数收益只会流向两款游戏。

正如Toto所言，如果开发者只认市场数据，其处境就相当危险。日本手游市场目前已被《Puzzle & Dragons》和《Monster Strike》两款游戏所垄断。

Puzzle & Dragons（from games.sina)

这一点都不夸张，《Puzzle & Dragons》在2013年就占据了整个日本手游收益将近51%的份额，如今《Puzzle & Dragons》和《Monster Strike》这两者在整个市场收益中占比介于70%至80%。

Toto针对开发者是否该尝试向日本发布游戏的问题提出了自己的看法，“作为行业顾问，我不应该做出这种建议，我花了大量时间试图说服开发者放弃进入日本市场的想法。一般来说，你只有在达到一定标准或者在世界其他主流市场完全饱和的情况下，才可以考虑日本市场。”

Toto所指的“特定标准”包括拥有庞大的营销预算。这种做法对于Supercell、King和Machine Zone旗下的热门游戏甚为有效。但即便如此，这三家公司的热门游戏也仅能跻身日本iOS和Android市场的前30名，它们在日本的表现远逊于在其他市场。

如果你拥有推出电视广告的庞大预算，Toto建议你至少应该具备以下一种条件：

*游戏具有创新理念，高产品价值，以及/或者瞄准特定的利基市场。

*本土发行商。

*即使只有少量玩家也能创造可观收益的机制。

如果你的游戏不符合上述条件中的一者，那就不值得在日本市场上浪费时间了。（本文由游戏邦编译，转载请注明来源，或咨询微信zhengjintiao）

Why Japan’s lucrative mobile gaming market isn’t great for foreign developers

Jeff Grubb

SINGAPORE — Mobile-game spending is higher in Japan than any other market, but that doesn’t mean you should necessarily do the work to localize your product for that country.

It’s easy to look at Japan and assume that if you’re making a game you should release it in there as well, but the raw data is deceiving, according to Kantan Games analyst Serkan Toto. At the Casual Connect Asia conference in Singapore earlier this week, Toto gave a presentation that highlighted some important points that he would want developers to know before entering the Japanese market. Most notably, he noted that it’s not nearly as easy to make money from gamers in that country as you might think it is.

“Japan is one of the hardest mobile-game markets to break into worldwide,” Toto said during his presentation.

The average revenue per gamer who spends money on in-app purchases (ARPPU) in Japan is about $65 every month. That’s a very high number, but you’re probably not going to capture even a dollar of that if you release your Western game in Japan — historically speaking. The country has long preferred to consume Japanese-made products over foreign releases, and that’s especially true in gaming.

“Whenever I talk to bigger game companies, there’s so much self-confidence going on,” Toto said. “And I’m always trying to tell them that people in Japan will say, ‘Who are you? We don’t care about what you’ve achieved in the U.S. or Europe.’”

This was always true in Japan’s traditional console-gaming market as well. Toto points to an incredible fact to prove his thesis.

“Between 2001 and 2013, the number of [foreign-made video game] titles in the top 100 in Japan was zero,” Toto said. “I think that’s an amazing number.”

But even for Japanese games, the app market is not printing money. Instead, most of the money is going to just two games.

“If you just look at the raw data, you’re on a very dangerous path,” Toto said. “Two apps dominate everything: Puzzle & Dragons and Monster Strike.”

These two games now run a duopoly on Japanese mobile-game spending. That’s not even a tiny bit of an exaggeration. Puzzle & Dragons accounted for approximately 51 percent of all mobile-game spending in Japan in 2013 on its own. These days, between Puzzle & Dragons and Monster Strike, the two games probably make up around 70 percent to 80 percent of the entire market’s spending, according to Toto.

So, yes, Japanese gamers are racking up huge charges in their smartphone games, but most of that is going to the same two places.

This prompted me to ask Toto if he would advise a developer to even try to bring a game into Japan.

“I shouldn’t do this as a consultant, but I spend a lot of time trying to convince developers out of the idea of getting into the Japanese market,” he told GamesBeat. “But, generally speaking, you should consider Japan only if you have met certain criteria or completely saturated the rest of the major markets in the world.”

Toto specified that the “certain criteria” includes having an enormous marketing budget. This has worked for publishers like Supercell, King, and Machine Zone with their games Clash of Clans, Candy Crush Saga, and Game of War, respectively. Though, even while those games are in the top 30 highest-grossing charts for iOS and Android in Japan, they aren’t performing nearly as well as they do in other countries.

If you don’t have a huge budget for TV ads, Toto suggests that you should have at least one if not all of the following:

A game with an innovative concept, high production values, and/or targeting a specific niche.

A local publisher.

Mechanics that generate decent levels of revenue even with very few players.

If your game doesn’t match any of that, Japan probably isn’t worth your time.（source：venturebeat）