CRACKING CHINA
If China doesn’t crack them first
THE VERDICT arrives right after the mini grilled cheese. Data scientist Tony He is pressed against the wall of a crowded bar in New York City’s West Village, one hand reaching for the hipster hors d’oeuvres, the other tirelessly refreshing his iPhone.
It’s a sweat-drenched evening in late July. Most of He’s colleagues are three or four drinks deep, shouting to be heard over the din at this party celebrating their latest launch. Dots, a three-year-old smartphone-game studio, has just published Dots & Co., its long-awaited sequel to globally beloved Two Dots. More than a million people will download the new game within the next few hours, thanks in part to a prime spot in Apple’s U.S. app store. “Are you a wizard? Because that was magical!” one employee crows, quoting the game she’s spent most of the year working on.
But He can’t unplug. Seven thousand miles away, 1.4 billion Chinese are starting their day. Hundreds of millions are grabbing smartphones and checking local app stores for the newest mobile games. He is checking Apple’s Chinese store along with them. If the new game scores prominent real estate there, too, Dots might finally break into China’s lucrative, maddening, nigh-impossible market.
“Ever since we started,” says Paul Murphy, co-founder and CEO of Dots, “I’ve had this obsession about China.”
For good reason: Next year, Chinese consumers will spend $8.3 billion—almost $23 million every day—on mobile games, according to Asian digital-games consultancy Niko Partners. Winning a morsel of that would catapult any company into the stratosphere. But real China success has consistently eluded even giant U.S. tech companies, and chasing it can be an expensive distraction.
Murphy has spent much of Dots’ life pursuing the promise of China. While his company has launched three internationally popular, well-reviewed games—hiring 50 people and notching $15 million in revenue in 2015, which it’s tracking to more than double this year—its CEO has methodically and persistently knocked on any door that could get him into the world’s biggest digital-gaming market. “If I want to build the next great game studio,” he decreed in March, “I have to be
