From Japan to the world, points to implement global expansion in games and GREE strategy

CEDEC 2012The "To 1 billion users. Impress the world with social games!In the lecture,GREEofEmilio GallegoWithYuki MatsukuraIn the case of social games provided by GREE, for example, we introduce concretely how Japanese games are delivered to the world market, and technical details unique to the globalization of social games had.

Emilio Gallego:
The market for mobile games is expected to grow from 600 million terminals to 1.2 billion terminals by 2015, and we anticipate market sales from 3.5 billion to 4 billion US dollars.



The future growth rate of access from each region using mobile (Latin America · North America · Asia · Europe) is about 400% in Latin America, etc. In the market which the consumer industry did not reach, such as mobile game and social game Distribution becomes possible.


In addition, we can distribute application games to all over the world from Japan, together with the planning and development for the management know-how that we have cultivated in Japan and platformGlobal platform of GREEIt is starting.


In GREE's global platform, by localizing the game binary, it is possible to distribute the contents to the whole world, multilingual correspondence on one platform can reduce time, cost and manpower, and the product There is a merit that you can deliver.


As one of the points to strengthen as a platform, the first is securing the application migrating conductors. We will develop the foundation for future promotion and build a foundation that will sell applications like overseas even in Japan. The second one is expanding the social graph. The third is strengthening the communication function. We are planning to create a mechanism to increase the installation by viral (word of mouth) effect.


Next is analysis of each country market. As for the scale of the market, the largest market will be about 450 billion yen in the US North America. Next, Japan is 160 billion yen, Germany is 80 billion yen. What languages ​​are required for major markets is English, Japanese, German, Chinese, French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish in that order.


I think that everyone wonders if it is necessary to localize in the first place. According to the information obtained from the ranking analysis of each country, the application that is sold 93% in Spain is localized in Spanish. In Italy, 80% of the applications are localized, 73% in France, 67% in Germany, 66% in Russia and 45% in Sweden. Therefore, if the application to be delivered overseas is not localized, there is a possibility that the market can not be acquired.


However, in order to localize, there are many things to think about. For example, if localizing in Chinese, will you create both versions of Simplified and Traditional? In the case of traditional letters, there is a problem that memory shortage and letters collapse depending on the terminal. Also, since more space is needed than Japanese, we need to consider the entire UI first. When localizing to Portuguese, the market you want to enter is slightly different depending on whether it is Brazilian or Portuguese. Similarly in Spanish it is necessary to decide which of Latin America and Spain to enter, whether to make it neutral, divide the version into Spanish version, and so on. There is a problem of whether French also divides versions between Canadian French speaking countries and France, and whether it is unified. After that, it is cost-effective to localize, how far it costs to localize and localize. First of all, it starts from the construction of the system, but if you consider the environment to localize from scratch, localization of a considerable part can be advanced on a machine basis. To get cost effectiveness you should consider reducing texture text extremely and avoiding specifications that require gender and number. The ultimate goal is whether you are a Spanish person or a German person as if you were made in your country while you were playing the gameUser ExperienceIt is to provide.


About release flow. In the case of Japan, we will check legal affairs, then FAQ. Up to this point, preparations for release are over, but only in the case of producing global version, it is necessary to check ethics, and the motifs used are not in violation of foreign cultures and laws, thought by country I have to go. In the legal check, we check whether graphics used in the system violate overseas laws. In addition, I will do language selection, platform selection, target selection etc. Since the terminals used in Europe and the terminals used in the USA are somewhat different as the points of attention of the terminals in the market, it is quite a big issue to decide how to optimize the system. As I mentioned earlier, we need to think about multilingualization system from the beginning. Where will you put the data center afterwards? Is there one data center in Japan, one in the USA, one in Europe, one in Asia, by region? As you can see here, releasing overseas requires a fairly complicated process, but it has considerable merits.


Next about the design side. There are many people who interpret social games overseas, especially in the case of the United States, as interpreting the game as art, and sophisticated things are required from the viewpoint of visuals. As an example, "Sword & Sworcery"When"LIMBO"is. Another thing I have to think about on the design side is that in Europe and the United States,FP (Feature Phone)Since there is no culture, I feel a lot of incongruity in scrolling the screen. Therefore, it is necessary to design such that information fits on one screen. So, I would like to introduce GREE's efforts from the perspective of global markets.


Pirate Kingdom ColumbusThe TOP page of TOPIC changed the graphics and made it a picture that fits overseas.


The color of this My Page is also changing. All cards in Japan are those of animation touch, but overseas cards are made real.


Quest progress is displayed using a bar with parameters that make you feel dynamic by making it dynamic.


GachaThe motifs are both treasure chests, but I have changed the treasure box with feet so much that I have not seen it overseas and feel uncomfortable.



The main character was changed from an animation character to a real character.


Also, although this is a character card, I made a new illustration with the original card. I made illustrations that were consistent with the atmosphere of the global version as accurately as possible. Some of the names are the same as the Japanese version, others are different. In the translation process, I am deciding the name of the overseas version, mainly about what kind of name matches when seeing this character.


nextHoly War Cerberusis. First of all, I made improvements to the UI many times by making efforts to convey the content of the game in an easy-to-understand manner, centering on landing pages as much as possible.


We have overlapped the Header configuration that emphasizes versatility as much as possible and the quality UP of the entire UI.


In banner production, to make a banner every timeCTR,CVRWe examined which one is for overseas. The one with many monsters and the one with many girls give out good results.


nextFishing ★ Staris. About fishing ★ star gacha motif, Texas state grandpa and grandma in the US playing fishing stades feel uncomfortable with temples and omikuji, so think inside the company and eventually change to something like a lucky point did.


The girl changed to a fish character. As this person feels that no matter where people seem to feel uncomfortable, I feel like this.


When thinking about events, we will develop mainly around motifs that can be passed wherever possible. For example, the universal worldview of "safari Island" and "Arabian Island" is easy to understand.


nextExploration Dorirandois. It will be the story of the previous ethics check. I think about whether or not you can use such a card inside the company. In GREE's global platform version, there are three possibilities: "use as it is", "use it by using it" and "do not use". As for these two cards, since they use the cross, we decided not to adopt it because it is better to avoid it for religious reasons. Also, because there is exposure of children's skin, it is not adopted. You also need to be aware of skulls and turning the gun to the user.


Even after that, regarding the exploration Dorirando, placement of information has changed considerably. There is a message right under the logo, but it is not in the global platform version. Also, I make improvements so that I can play without feeling uncomfortable as much as possible by enlarging the logo.


nextClinoppe. Since it was a game for the browser, there were many pictograms. Since Japan has a Chinese character, there is no sense of incongruity even if pictograms are mixed in the sentence, but from the Roman-style culture, letters and pictograms are different things, if you put an emoticon in the sentence it becomes rather difficult to read So I deleted pictograms.


Another thing, in Japan, I changed what I was eating with chopsticks to a spoon.



About text management. In browser games, text management is often managed by PO and DOC files, but because it is not suitable for multiple languages, we have to rebuild the system when creating multilingual versions. It is recommended that you manage it with Excel file when possible. In consumer games, it is an ordinary way, but in browser games and social games there are things I still manage with DOC files. It is better to manage with Excel as much as possible.


LQA (Language Quality Assurance)I will explain in detail. It is difficult to grasp how much translation time and budget is needed. If it is an average 100 thousand character product, the output which one translator can output per day will be 3000 to 5000 characters, so if it is 100 thousand characters, 20 business days are required. Even in 20 business days, there is work to check, so it takes a little over a month. Because it costs about 10 yen to 20 yen per character, as a rough estimate of expenses, it will be about 1 million yen per 100,000 characters. LQA is divided into Linguistic Testing and Localized QA. Linguistic Testing basically checks whether the translation is correct or whether there are misspellings. Localization QA is a function check of overseas version, and we do general check whether time notation is present or distribution function is suitable. In addition, as multilingual management, it is necessary to make glossary production, word unification, and system message unification.


As for what kind of problem comes out from the variables, the choice of choosing your own king in the Japanese version includes both the king and the queen. In the case of localizing it in Western countries, I avoided it by using the word "monarch" that can be used with male nouns and feminine nouns, but in the case of a message "The King handed in the potion", the king chose "king It is necessary to separate the message ID, whether it is "queen" or not. If this is not done in the back end of the system, it will be quite unnatural localization.


The other is "Your receive 1 portion" and "Your receive 2 portion" when you say "I got one potion" and "I got two pieces of potion" in English, both are not plural, so It will remain natural. So you need to introduce more than one variable or avoid problems on the localization side. Finally, what I wanted to say is to provide a user experience that allows foreign overseas local users to play as if they were made in their own country, in order to succeed in the global market.


Yuki Matsukura:
I will start the second half. The second half will talk about engineering to internationalize social games. It is largely divided into two parts. I would like to talk about system design in the first half, about implementation in the second half.


First of all, it is the arrangement of words of internationalization and localization. Let's learn this definition first. Since there was an easy-to-understand figure, I would like to explain in a conceptual diagram what internationalization and regionalization is like. The bottom part is the internationalization part, which is the base design part of the system that makes it possible to display the system itself in various languages. After building the foundation, it is the upper part called regionalization, the message suitable for each country, each region, and the part which displays the unit of currency. Therefore, in order to internationalize languages ​​and expand the world, it is necessary to first make the internationalization part and then do localization part.


Frequently the internationalization part is called I18n, internationalization, and for regionalization above L10n, it is called localization. G10n has such a word as globalization, this represents the whole.


Next, in internationalization of social games, it is easy to think easily that games can be delivered to the world simply by English, but in reality it is necessary to make decisions and make decisions in engineering There are a lot of things I have to do. I will arrange the points that need to be discussed about this, and I will explain from now on.


First, regarding world division, world divisionMMORPGI think that it is often done, but in the United States, Japan, or completely divide the world so that users can not interact during that time. As an advantage of the world split, it can be optimized for the release area. For example, if you are delivering games to the US, if you put it in the US data center for the United States,LatencyThere are few things that I can do without being conscious of only US users, especially communicating in particular. As a disadvantage, there is a problem that, for example, users in the United States and Japan can not interact with each other, beginners get involved from the middle and can not optimize too much.


In internationalization of social games, it is sometimes what kind of delivery form we have to take first. There are contrasts as to whether to put out on the Web or Native. Each has advantages and disadvantages. In the case of the Web, it refers to a game that can be played with a Web browser, and Native is a Native application for iOS · Android. First of all, as a comparison target, it is marketing. For marketing, it becomes the flow of the whole Web from the Internet and the Web page, and in Native it buys it from the marketplace, GooglePlay and Apple's iTunes store.RevenueAs for the Web, there is 100% sales, but if you use the marketplace fee etc will be taken. Although it is offline data, basically, the one who had the content cachable locally has a quick response, so there are differences in the way of caching. On the Web there is a way to set expires with Local Strage or HTTP. In case of Native, you can set the cache finely like you like. Regarding the ease of development, development on the Web can be done at high speed and future architecture is not so different, so it can be permanent. As for Native, it is costly to acquire the engineer and can not go about API change of SDK, and it costs maintenance cost. Regarding the ease of updating, users can play new games immediately on the Web as soon as they change the contents of the Web, but in the case of Native, for example on iOS it takes time to review for two weeks or three weeks release New features can not be released immediately.


Once, as a form which took a cousin of Web and Native application, Native applicationWebViewThere is a way to move it in. Basically GREE is deploying Web-based social applications in Japan, so we add and release useful elements of Native application. As for marketing, after all, there is merit in the place where red wire is drawn, but market place is available. Both Local Strage and Native API can be used for offline data, so you can use one with the most convenient content. Since the ease of development is also Web, its advantages are that PDC can be rotated at high speed. It's easy to update.


In juneE3I did it in LA, but there is a place I actually felt by looking at the place the user is using. The first is that scrolling is not recognized. in Japanfeature phoneThere is a flow from becoming a smartphone from, it scrolls when there is no button by displaying the application, Westerners do not scroll. Because I sometimes do not understand that there is a button on the lower side, I thought that improvement of UI is important. The second point is that the back button is not recognized. I basically think that Western users are Naitive applications and use the WebView application, so even if I prepare a back button, I do not notice it as a back button. You have to show back button on the UI or have a next button prepared. The third point is that you hit a button repeatedly. Basically, if you click on the Native application as soon as you click on the response, you will know immediately, but in the case of the Web you are reading at the back, so if you do not apply an effect to the button once, There is a case that the next page is not displayed because it thinks that there is nothing, repeatedly hits the button, the back connection is blown. When the button is clicked properly such as JavaScript etc., it is necessary to display the loading. I felt that I had to learn around here by tutorial and so on. It is close to that, there is a thing that the tutorial is not completed unless you first swipe two fingers in the installation of Mac, but it is necessary to have something close to it.


Next is the story around the back end of the system. When internationalizing domestic services, there are things that we do not discuss each time without arguing much about the backend of the system, but there are parts that need to be discussed as well. For example, I think that we will create a user ID and so on with a primary key for a DB, but if we use unsigned integer 32 bit space at that time, about 4.3 billion will be the upper limit of ID. If it is 4.3 billion, if you spread games overseas and become popular, there is a possibility of exhaustion of ID if there is duplicate registration etc. So, up oneBigintI think that it is better to secure future extensibility. There is also a means to change it later, but since it takes useless time, I think that it was safer to have expanded first. Regarding the programming language, it depends on OS and architecture, but it is better to build it basically with what is supported by 64 bit. As for Javascript, Javascript also has browser dependency, but since it can not use numbers if it is 53 bits or more, if the user ID is 64 bit space, do not make it not used for numerical calculation by treating the side by character string etc I can not do it.


Next, regarding MySQL character encoding, there is a bit tricky point in the MySQL character code, using utf8 only supports Unicode 3.0, only about 50,000 characters are supported. So, in order to deal with the newest Unicode 3.1 and newer ones, you have to use utf8mb4 since MySQL 5.5.3. For example, if you use Utf 8 normally, 4 byte character strings and others can not be saved.


Next, it is widely said to be Unicode, but when talking about what is Unicode, it is an organization of standards to unify the character set internationally, and when internationalizing it uses a set of Unicode . Unicode has version, latest is 6.1.3. As a big change, pictograms were added in version 6.0.0, and the number of characters increased significantly in version 3.1.


There are about 90 presentations of organizations setting Unicode. If you read about 90 of them, you understand Unicode and character codes deeper, but that summary is written like this. There is no problem if you use UTF - 8 because there is "to use UTF - 8 for the Web".


Then, about designing communication between users. Basically, in social games communication between users becomes an important factor. It is also important how to communicate with people. Until now, you need to be concerned about what you did not need to worry about between Japanese. The freedom is higher the more free text is. Instead, there is a risk that communication between multiple languages ​​can not be taken. In the case of fixed form sentences, I often see it in the game of PS 3, but in Japan it will be delivered in localized words when choosing "Hello" and when reaching the other party. As a new method, there is machine translation. After entering free text, it will be translated into words suitable for that country. Translation may be appropriate, but there is an approach that roughly makes sense. Depending on the characteristics of the game, you need to choose communication around there.


When internationalizing, interatrial latency must be considered. This is the result of the benchmark actually taken at the data center. It takes 0.15 seconds from Japan to the west coast, 0.15 seconds from the west coast to Europe, and 0.3 seconds from Japan to Europe. It changes depending on the route, but it seems to be like this when it is the feeling we measured with hand at hand.


0.15 seconds thinks that it is not so much time to think on the Web, but profiling when actually displaying it on a web page looks like this. In many cases, it is necessary to load multiple contents to display one web page. In that case latency will gradually accumulate and have a big influence. If it is the first connection, it is not worrisome if it is 0.15 seconds, but it may be accumulated as a total. To reduce content loading and prepare cash, you have to think more than Japan. Especially when I live in Japan, the line speed in Japan is low latency and the bandwidth is wide, so I may not be conscious of it much, but in the United States or the like, the line condition is bad, so benchmark in severe It is necessary to take. In order to take a benchmark, it is best to take a local motion picture. I was doing it in Japan and thought that it would be as much as I thought that it would not come out at all or I thought it was really important to do it locally.


Although I said that caching of content is important earlier, how to do is roughly divided into the concept of preloading and dynamic loading. Preloading is a method of downloading the whole thing first when you launch the application, and dynamic loading is a technique of caching downloaded things as you play games.


I believe that there are caching methods like this for web based applications, I think that it will be a preloading if you go up and a dynamic load approach if you go down. As a thing that can be used, it is a way to preload the app on the Native application side and cache it. As a dynamic load, there is a way to decide when to Expire to the Expire header of HTTP and leave the cache to the browser all. In some cases it can also be used for hybrids, so we will use it to build applications.


To summarize HTML content delivery, first refrain from redirecting. Redirects also respond to latency. Static files are cached on the client. For static contentCDNLet's use as much as possible. Inquiries are a matter of course if you are making the Web at minimum, but it is especially important for overseas to do what you normally do one by one.


What becomes important when it comes to internationalization is abstraction of language. In terms of detail, time division by time zones. There is some optimization of content, but language abstraction is serious, and it will become important in the future. We need to think deeply about language abstraction.


I briefly summarized the maturity of language abstraction. If level 1 is compatible with English, the market will spread, so it will be English equivalent. Corresponds to multiple major languages ​​at level 2 or localizing more. First, you need to aim for Level 1 and Level 2.


There are various methods of internationalization, and I have studied open source things,De facto standardThere was no such thing as could be. For the time being, as a result of taking a benchmark,GettextIt was early, so I implemented it with gettext.


The gettext benchmark was the fastest compared to others.


The code looks something like this, incorporating gettext functions before and after Japanese, abstracting the language.


For HTML as well, I will define and mark up the original function.


Eventually this will fall into the gettext adaptation file like this.


It is the number of languages ​​used for one product for reference. The upper one has word number 2216 of one product, the lower one is multibyte, there are around 45,000 characters in one product.


As a result of running gettext, there were various problems. In the case of making with PHP, Apache caches the language text of gettext, so if you change the language key or change the translation, it is necessary to delete Smarty's template and restart Apache. Also, although Japanese is the same, there were points that I could not deal with where I would like to change the English notation.


Since internationalization of social games has just started, there are many technical problems, so if you have an engineer who can attack here, I think that you can lend wisdom. I am thinking that I am internationalizing the unique culture of Japan and creating a market that can be accepted abroad.


To summarize, by internationalizing, the market will be tenfold from 1 billion to 1 billion. I gave an introduction to internationalization approach and tools on attention and engineering when designing motifs into localization.