It is practically impossible to sell your game without any help in China if you are a small game making company from Finland like us. Fortunately we have a partnership with a Finnish company which specializes in distributing games in China and they have seen the potential of Gladiator Bastards in the Asian market. Our distributor partner has helped us through a lot of complicated bureaucracy and red tape in order to have our game released in the land of the dragons. This alone is a tough cracker to deal with as a westerner but then you have to also deal with the complicated cultural differences between the east and the west and adjust your game accordingly.
For example there can be no blood or splatter in the Chinese version nor can there be any advertisements either. Swearing and anti-establishment behavior is also a big no-no. So the Chinese get pretty watered down version of our not so intelligent dialog boxes ;) One big task has been integrating with the Chinese operators in game app purchase systems. Fortunately for us we could outsource this task.
In addition there were some gameplay altering changes that the Chinese operator wanted. At first glance these requirements felt crushing but then we thought that the changes were really good and added to the replay value of the Gladiator Bastards. So we decided to import these gameplay changes (don't worry, the blood stays in) to western version too!
This fall there will be a relaunch of ALL NEW Gladiator Bastards and this time we will release the long awaited IOS version for you to try out too! Stay tuned for the next blog update where we describe in depth the changes made to the game. You don't have to wait it for seven months (knock wood).
