Blueberry Open Class: How Game Art Improved the Conversion of Overseas Games

In 2022, the overseas expansion of domestic games continued to forge its own path and was in full swing. According to statistics, Chinese game developers had accounted for more than 23% of the leading overseas game market, ranking first in the world in overseas markets.

Taking leading platforms as an example, in March 2022, a total of 38 Chinese manufacturers were shortlisted for the top 100 global mobile game publisher revenue list, with a total revenue of more than 2.22 billion US dollars, accounting for nearly 40.2% of the global top 100 mobile game publisher revenue.

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Looking back on 2021, a total of 42 Chinese mobile games had earned more than US$100 million in overseas markets, with 5 more games added based on 2020. As a well-known service provider that focused on providing high-quality art consulting, art production, and software services to global game companies, Blueberry conducted research on these top games with revenue exceeding US$100 million and found that localized design of game content was one of the most important factors for successfully integrating into overseas markets, and game art design was a crucial part of the localization design of game content.

How Game Art Design Improved Conversion Rates

At that time, the overseas expansion of domestic mobile games was undoubtedly an important period of product dividends, but it was undeniable that the road to overseas games was always full of challenges: cultural barriers caused by cultural differences had caused many games that were interested in going overseas to suffer from serious "acclimatization," unable to successfully open overseas markets, and ultimately failed. How to effectively solve the problem of "acclimatization" was the key to the success of domestic games in overseas markets. As a pioneer in overseas games, "Awakening of Nations," which had swept the global overseas market since 2019, was a perfect case that proved that excellent localized art design helped transform overseas markets.

According to SensorTower statistics, in October 2019, "Awakening of Nations," which Blueberry was deeply involved in the production, had been launched in 152 countries and regions around the world, ranking TOP 1 on the best-selling game list in 44 regions, and entering the TOP 5 best-selling game list in 102 regions; at the same time, "Awakening of Nations" had broken the ceiling of domestic SLG mobile games overseas (US$54 million) in just 16 months. After entering the Japanese market at the end of 2019, its peak monthly revenue had exceeded US$80 million. In the 2019 overseas revenue list, "Awakening of Nations" had ranked second, second only to "PUBG MOBILE" (Blueberrys also participated in the production), sweeping the global market.

"Awakening of Nations" was a multi-civilization SLG mobile game, covering Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Ottoman, Byzantine, Roman, German, British, French, Spanish, and Viking styles combined. The 12 civilizations were a huge challenge for the game's art team. 

Not only did it require the art team to have a lot of knowledge, but it also needed to understand the characteristics and style of each civilization and integrate it with the overall style of the game. There was no doubt that the excellent art design team of Blueberry had done it. The great success of the game after its launch proved that they had overcome this problem. 

The overall game style of "Awakening of Kingdoms" had abandoned the traditional realistic painting style and adopted a unique and exquisite 3D American cartoon style. This brightly colored American cartoon style, under the control of the superb art design skills, was not very. The version was not very realistic, which was refreshing for overseas mobile game players.

As Ada Liu, founder of Blueberry, had analyzed at the Game Overseas Marketing Summit: "How to get a better conversion rate through localized art design? You must first understand who the target users are and what they wa

Ada Liu The founder of Blueberry

Ada Liu had said that in terms of age, young users were generally more inclined to faster-paced storylines and cartoon-like, brightly colored art designs. In contrast, older users were more receptive to historical, deeper, slower-paced narratives, as well as art designs with humanistic elements. 

In terms of gender, female users generally preferred "fantasy", "fashion" or "Disney" art themes; in contrast, male users preferred war, science fiction, or adventure elements. art theme. From a regional perspective, if a game chose to be released in Asia, its character design, whether male or female, required exquisite faces, slender thighs, and exaggerated body proportions; in contrast, European and American users favored characters with normal proportions and a more muscular look.