Apaja's Playray now in 16 countries
Well, almost. In a press released yesterday, Apaja Online Entertainment announced that they will be launching a localised Belgian website of their Playray service with a partnership with Corelio and MTV Networks. At the moment their Belgian website is directing users to France or Netherlands, depending which language and social circle they enjoy more is asking users which language preference they enjoy (edited due to earlier mishap in the analysis - see comments).
According to Kim Lindholm, Business Development Director, the Belgian registrations in the French and Dutch services attracted so many Belgians that they had to build localised version of the service in Belgium. Despite being an area where languages mix with ease and people understand each other easily, there are a lot of differences between people in the BeNeLux countries and thus localising each service makes common sense in the long run.
A recent survey conducted in Playray revealed that the social aspects of the service are equally important to the casual games. This strengthens the latest understanding of the industry that social gaming is on the rise. Furthermore a third of new registrants are over 35 which also supports the broadening of the user base, in line with previous studies.
It remains to be seen how successful such a rapid expansion strategy is. Apaja's 2007 financial figures are still unpublished in the public listings, but looking at the 2006 results the company ran a loss almost equal to its annual revenue.
Disclaimer: I am a former employee of Apaja Online Entertainment.
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Antti, we're not exactly as lazy as to redirect traffic from playray.be to Playray France and/or Holland and call it another country :)
Playray Belgium is actually a fully localized experience, with campaigns and competitions targeted at belgian users only. Even the site content is in the process of being adapted to the local dutch and french dialects (flemish and wallonian). The service is promoted with a "local tone" on TMF, MTV and in local tabloids(websites in the french and dutch regions of the country. Yes, we even had to re-record the dutch voiceover in our TV ads because they sounded too "hollands", which pretty much describes with one example the differences between Belgians and their neighbours despite sharing the same language.
Everything has ofcourse not been completely "localized" yet, and what the the local flemish and wallonian sites do share with the neighbouring playray countries is the community. I.e. players choosing the wallonian language on playray.be can play against users in France, and players that choose flemish meet dutch users in the gamerooms.
If anyone of you have any experience from Belgium or similar bilingual regions, I'd appreciate any help/feedback to improve the experience even more!
- Kim Lindholm / Apaja
Kim, my bad - did not look carefully enough at the URLs. But you are correct about the small differences in the cultures that in the end, unfortunately for companies, make a big difference in the user experience.
Not commenting anything in detail but at least the current figures are looking a bit better than the numbers from 2006.
We're not going to open new countries in the near future with the same pace as in the recent 12-18 months (even though the new country launches aren't the key factor in our cost base with our current model) while we're going to focus more on developing the existing markets.
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