This article is part of our series interview of China Top Apps.
As one of China most successful games in global market, Fishing Joy has achieved impressive performance in app stores, ranking Top Free No.1 in 33 countries, and Top Grossing No.1 in 20 countries, with 20 million downloads in 6 months. It is ranked as No. 1 casual game in China under a single brand in terms of number of downloads by iOS and Android device users.
Founded in 2010, Puchbox, the developer team behind Fishing Joy, has raised over US$ 14 million in Series B from Sequoia China and Steamboat Ventures with a total funding of over 15.6 million. With such a big success both in reputation and in finance, however, it is not optimistic for Chinese developers, said the founder and CEO Chen Haozhi.
Firstly, the market scale in China is still small, with less than 2 billion RMB (or US$ 310 million) production value for mobile games. However, with almost no growth in this market, more and more developers enter this market, which increases the competition within the market. Secondly, the development of oversea market is not as easy as supposed. It’s hard to understand what oversea users really want with Chinese mindset. At last, 90% of the app teams in China develop similar products with almost no difference. A successful app always follows by bunch of the other similar ones with very little novel content or features. It hardly makes success among thousands.
Chen suggests Chinese mobile game developers to learn not only the ideas of oversea apps, but also the ways they operate an app. There are many todos and not todos which you can learn from the others. He predicts that there will be 20 times in growth in global mobile internet market in 2011~2015. And he believes there will higher growth rate in China market than in oversea market, although 70% of the revenue comes from oversea market. Thus he is making efforts to accumulate brand and users in China market.
When talking about choice of platform, Chen makes his priority on iOS, although, in the middle of 2011, PunchBox has launched the games on both iOS and Android platforms, and made some investment in a cross-platform game development engine Cocos2D-X. He has no solid plans on HTML5 game development. He also emphasis a combination of Tapjoy and Admob in game promotion.
Chen uses iPhone4S for his daily work, and an Android phone as a backup.
Fishing Joy CEO Chen Haozhi speaking in Mobile Developer Conference China 2011
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