
Making games in Qatar: How a small team built a company in an unlikely place - cpeterso
http://www.polygon.com/features/2014/5/13/5542406/qatar-girnaas-giddam
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dsirijus
There's game companies doing very profitably whose basic business model is -
localization. [1] Word games work easiest for this case.

Localizing international game is also a non-trivial task (especially from
western to asian markets), but it can easily lead to ten-folding your profits.
[2] [3]

[1]
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Fugo](https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Fugo)

[2]
[http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/HenryFong/20130423/191019/And...](http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/HenryFong/20130423/191019/Android_App_Stores_of_China_What_Western_Mobile_Game_Developers_Need_to_Know.php)

[3]
[http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/HenryFong/20130717/196436/Saf...](http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/HenryFong/20130717/196436/Safari_PostMortem_How_an_Australian_Mobile_Game_Became_a_Chinese_Hit.php)

~~~
lucaspiller
The 3rd article touches on this saying that there is more to localisation than
just translation, but one of the hardest parts of localisation is how you
actually charge people for your content. The issue is more than just a few
places like China, outside of the main Western countries a lot of people don't
have credit cards or don't want to associate them with their app store
account.

"As an example Fortumo elaborates there are four times more mobile phones in
the world than credit cards and in countries like Brazil, Russia, India and
China, credit card ownership is as low as 15%." [1]

One of the best ways (at least for the user) is operator billing, using this
the charge is deducted from the user's prepay balance (or added to their
postpay bill, but again contracts are uncommon outside Western countries). If
they need to buy more Farmville stars they can just go to a shop and top up
their phone. Google supports this on a limited number of operators, but even
in places like the UK where operator billing is quite mature, they only
support it on one. Companies like Fortumo are doing better, but there are
still a lot of local payment options missed by this.

As much as companies such as PayPal like to say they are the solution for
global payments, the problem isn't solved yet.

[1] [http://www.arcticstartup.com/2014/03/25/fortumo-opens-
fund-o...](http://www.arcticstartup.com/2014/03/25/fortumo-opens-fund-
of-e1-million-for-developers-to-intergrate-operator-based-in-app-billing)

~~~
dsirijus
Just unrelated addendum to Fortumo - they enable developers from countries
where Google Merchant account is not available to charge for in-app purchases
on Play Store.

We'll be using it in two of our upcoming games.

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Einstalbert
This doesn't surprise me, much. We were approached by officials from Qatar for
an SaaS of sorts, and we learned all about their culture or perhaps, more
specifically, their funding. There's so much money in Qatar and so much of it
being spent on putting them on the map, a nationalistic software push was
bound to happen eventually.

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fivedogit
I live in flyover country and I'd argue it's easier to form and maintain a
team of engineers in another country than here. In other countries, the talent
can't get to better locales for immigration reasons, leaving them stuck on
whatever team they're on. In flyover country, there's a constant lure of your
hard-trained talent to the tech hubs.

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Cenk
The game’s pretty shit though.

