You might assume that a successful game in one country could go on to be successful in others around the world. But culture plays a major role in how well a game is or isn’t received — a role that manifests itself in radically different ways, ranging from payment platforms to graphic designs.

A panel of international game developers and analysts addressed this issue today at GamesBeat@GDC. Initially, several of them commented that there are many commonalities between cultures in the gaming world — almost everyone around the world is becoming more engaged with social games, virtual economies and web-interfaces, for example. Tomoko Namba, CEO of rapidly-growing mobile gaming company DeNA in Japan, said that small beta efforts have played just as well in the U.S. as they have in Japan.

But, as the discussion progressed, it became clear that game companies need to draw finer distinctions in order to gain traction.

Illuminating just one of these differences, Aroon Tan, managing director at Magma Studios, said that most Asian titles feature heroes that appear more androgynous and almost feminine, while games developed in the west have more burly, masculine protagonists. He said that traits as simple as this are enough to tank a game in an overseas market.

“These cultural norms don’t translate as well,” Tan said. “Finding a universally appealing design with graphics is very hard.”

But the look and feel of games aren’t the only differences that can alienate prospective customers. Distribution structure also makes a big difference. As Klaas Kersting, CEO of German Gameforge, pointed out, you have to be able to scale rapidly to succeed in new markets. In order to do so, you have to truly understand how people discover new games, what times of day and for how long do they play them, and how do they share them with the people they know. All of these infrastructure questions can vary dramatically from country to country, Kersting said. Local partners who understand these criteria are invaluable in this situation.

Tan echoed Kersting: “What kind of local partners do you have in the market? You can’t just build a great product. If the barrier to entry is too strong, you won’t get any traction.”

The panelists points to Electronic Arts’ efforts to grow its foothold in China as one of many examples of these challenges. One of the biggest gaming companies in the world, EA is still failing to lure millions of customers in Japan and China, both.

“I’ve seen a lot of cross cultural tries. All the big companies with close to a billion dollars try,” said Won Il Sue, vice president of business development for Nexon America. “But it’s not about the money — can they manage it well? There’s not enough management for the talent. It’s not just about being bilingual — it’s about being cross-cultural. It’s going to take much longer than everyone thinks.”

The arena where better management is most needed is payment, especially when it comes to mobile games. In America, people are used to a subscriber model, in which they make one major payment a month or a year for full access in the meantime. Elsewhere, in Asia and Europe, people are more accustomed to a pre-paid model, in which they buy a certain amount of minutes upfront and watch their funds winnow down with use.

“There is very different behavior between pre-paid customers and subscribers,” Tan noted. “People who pre-pay are more regularly monitoring the amount they have and may not spend as much as someone who makes a regular monthly payment.”

In order for a single paid mobile game to successfully cross borders, it will need to bake in many modes of payment that appeal to consumers regardless of their mobile habits. Kersting underscored this need, saying that Gameforge has added payment models to appeal to not just cultural differences, by geographical, age, gender, etc.

All of the panelists agreed that companies looking to break into overseas markets need to onboard people who are familiar with local culture and preferences, who can educate them about the challenges and the opportunities before they run into or miss them.

“The most important thing is to meet the people who get it,” Tan said. “Local talent reduces human resources risk and investor risk.”

Read all our coverage from GamesBeat@GDC.

Tags: GamesBeat@GDC

Companies: DeNA, Gameforge, Magma Studios, Nexon America

Sibblingz aims to make social gaming seamless across multiple platforms, including the iPhone, Facebook, and the web. The company is competing as a finalist today in the startup competition at our GamesBeat@GDC event in San Francisco.

In our previous coverage of Sibblingz, we mentioned that the company has created a platform that allows game developers to create social games that can be played “anytime, anywhere, on a number of platforms.” The idea is that you can start playing a game on your iPhone while commuting, and then continue playing via Facebook, or the web, elsewhere. It earns money through partner-based revenue sharing of virtual goods from within games.

The company will add other platforms over time like Google Android. The service is currently in closed private beta, which will last throughout the first quarter of 2010.

Sibblingz is also reminiscent of a recent Microsoft demonstration which showed off a single game running on Windows Phone 7 Series, Windows PCs, and the Xbox 360. There’s no telling if Microsoft is looking towards similar social gaming territory, but given the success of the gaming niche, it wouldn’t be terribly surprising.

The Mountain View, Calif.,-based company was founded in 2007, and has received $500,000 in seed funding from chairmen Peter Relan’s YouWeb.

Read all of our coverage from GamesBeat@GDC

Tags: GamesBeat@GDC, social games

Companies: Sibblingz

For any gamer who has ever wanted to create complex 3D gaming environments of their own — like those first seen in the classic Nintendo 64 title Mario 64 — Atmosphir is for you.

Developed by Minor Studios, Atmosphir is a game platform that allows PC and Mac users to create their own 3D adventure games, share them online, and play games created by others. It’s like a more refined and modern version of early game-creation platforms like RPG Maker, except it’s simple enough for anyone to use, and is built with social gaming in mind. Atmosphir is competing as a finalist today in the startup competition at our GamesBeat@GDC event in San Francisco.

The game platform has been running in closed pre-beta testing since October 2008. The developers will open up Atmosphir to anxious gamers waiting on their beta list over the next few months. While previous testers had to download a client to their computer to create and play Atmosphir games, the developers are moving towards a web browser-based model for new beta testers.

Thus far 25,000 levels have been created by the some 20,000 pre-beta testers. Atmosphir will add another 20,000 testers in its new beta rollout. Atmosphir’s competitors include Roblox, Wild Pockets, and Sony’s Little Big Planet for the Playstation 3.

San Francisco-based Minor Studios is part of the Minor Ventures family, and has received $1.2 million in funding.

View a video of Atmosphir in action below:

Read all of our coverage from GamesBeat@GDC

Tags: Atmosphir, GamesBeat@GDC, social games

Companies: Minor Studios

A startup called Desura is getting ready to challenge online game distribution systems like Valve’s fast-growing Steam. The company plans to launch its platform in two months, but today it’s competing as a finalist in the startup competition at our GamesBeat@GDC event in San Francisco.

While on-stage, Desura will announce that it’s starting to look for venture funding, as well as a chief executive to build the company.

So why would developers and gamers choose Desura? It will include important-but-not-unique features like developer tools, in-game community, and auto-patching. More importantly, founder Scott Reismanis said Desura will be the only platform allowing independent developers to create their own content for existing games. Those can run the gamut from characters to single maps to entire games built on top of existing engines.

Resmanis also said Desura will be more developer- and community-driven than its competitors. Developers get a profile where they can post whatever content they want. Community members get to post comments, review games, and upload screenshots.

One drawback facing Steam, Reismanis said, is that it’s run by Valve. Since Valve makes hugely successful games like the Half-Life and Left 4 Dead series, there’s a potential conflict of interest there, one that rears its head whenever Steam rejects a game. Desura, on the other hand, comes from the team that created indie game developer site Mod DB, which it says has 400,000 members and receives 2 million unique visitors per month.

Desura will take a 30 percent cut of each game sold, and also enable the sale of user content through microtransactions.

Read all of our coverage from GamesBeat@GDC.

Tags: GamesBeat@GDC

Companies: Desura

People: Scott Reismanis

Looking to stake a claim in the online gaming market, Turiya Media today announced the launch of its Leafnode product, which helps game publishers better retain and monetize their customers through mining and analyzing behavioral data. The company is also competing as a finalist today in the startup competition our GamesBeat@GDC conference in San Francisco.

Turiya Media notes that online gamers spend a lot of time interacting with games, but publishers have limited access and visibility into what motivates their customers and how best to monetize them. To solve this problem, the company’s Leafnode product utilizes advanced predictive algorithms to track hours of logged time by individual players and create individual behavioral profiles. 

Leafnode focuses on three areas of the game user lifecycle — acquisition, retention and monetization. Each individual gamer profile gives insight into predicted behavior, play patterns, psychographics, lifetime value, and through automated virtual goods recommendations.

Turiya Media hopes to make money by charging game publishers a monthly fee to mine and analyze data. The fee could increase based on the amount of data being processed. However, the company believes its main revenue stream will come from through virtual goods recommendations, and taking a piece of the new lift created by our technology.

A company with similar services, though it would appear not as robust, would be Boston-based Orbus Gameworks, which codes in tracking commands based on what the individual game publisher is interested in tracking.

Turiya Media, founded in 2009, has offices in San Francisco and New York City and has secured $1 million in funding from various investors, led by FirstMark Capital. The company says several leading gaming publishers have committed to developing and deploying the predictive analytics platform.

Read all of our coverage from GamesBeat@GDC

Tags: GamesBeat@GDC, Leafnode

Companies: Firstmark Capital, Orbus Gameworks, Turiya Media

BeanJar is a new game awards company that launched in the last week, and competing today as a finalist in the startup competition at our GamesBeat@GDC conference in San Francisco.

The company’s goal is to create a rewards system for video games, giving real prizes to players for their accomplishments in a game.

The system works a lot like tickets at an arcade, but in this case, they’re called “Beans.” You get a certain number of beans for doing specific things in a game. Players store those beans, and eventually cash them out for coupons to buy real-life goods. Instead of the pointless toys you’d get at an arcade, though, BeanJar plans to work with real, brick-and-mortar stores to provide better rewards, from free drinks to things bigger and better.

The idea, the company says, is a win for everyone. For companies, they get to sponsor a game and get advertising in front of gamers, as well as bring new customers to come to their stores because free stuff is so compelling. For game publishers, signing up these sponsors is a better revenue stream than having to put annoying ads into games. For gamers, well, they get free stuff, all based on their location and preferences.

Other companies, like Yowza, SuperRewards, and JumpTap, have all tried a portion of this model, but tying coupons to rewards to video games is something only BeanJar appears to be doing. The real-world rewards is a particularly compelling point for game publishers, because it might make players play and care more than they would if the spoils of victory were only within the game itself.

BeanJar’s money comes from collecting a small fee every time a player earns a Bean for a particular retailer, and again every time players cash out their Beans to make a purchase. Those fees get shared between BeanJar and the game publisher.

The company has launched in beta, with one game and a few retailers available. The company is currently four people, and they’ve raised $375,000 for BeanJar.

Read all of our coverage from GamesBeat@GDC

Tags: GamesBeat@GDC

Companies: co:BeanJar