Spreading out to new regions can result in a higher number of new players quickly. However, player count from certain regions of Asia is not as lucrative as certain other parts of the world, for a variety of reasons.
“Asia is not our highest priority,” said Gerhard Florin, chairman of InnoGames and former European exec for Electronic Arts. “It’s good for reach and to have lots of MAUs and DAUs, especially if I go to the Philippines, but I’ll never make any money there. They are huge Facebook markets but deliver extremely small revenues. We’re more interested in the revenue making than the millions of people inflating our servers but never paying anything. The balance needs to be kept.”
“We’ve had a pretty terrible time, like most developers, in South East Asia – Indonesia, Malaysia, India. These regions only inflate your numbers and they muddy the water on the analytics side because you’ll see an influx of 20,000 people, but right away we know that most of them are not going to come back the next day,” added A Bit Lucky CEO Frederic Descamps. “And most of them have a pretty terrible connection so they’re not going to enjoy the game. And they absolutely do not monetize. To put it more bluntly in our case, we are targeting North America and Europe because those are the audiences that retain the best and monetize the best. So in some ways we’re not spending any efforts to market in those other regions.”
Source: GamesIndustry.biz
