Liu said PopCap learned "millions of lessons" from launching Plants vs. The local content was so popular that, behind the Egypt-themed levels, which had to be played in order to unlock other levels, the Chinese kung fu levels were the most played. Every Chinese person can recognize it in a second." "The kung fu master zombie and drunken zombie master are such popular images in China. "We know local content is very attractive to local users," Liu said. In culturalizing the game, PopCap also introduced the peach plant, which is iconic in Chinese culture, the kung fu master zombie and the drunken monk zombie. Zombies 2 became the top download and top grossing mobile game in China. Unlike the Western version of the game, the Chinese version requires the use of hard currency to buy sun, coins, plant pieces, star gates, plant food and gestures. The developers modified the game by introducing three star levels, plants that can only be unlocked by collecting puzzle pieces and changing the game's economy. To overcome users pirating the game from other territories, PopCap decided to "culturalize" the game for its official Chinese launch. And before PopCap had even developed an Android version, someone in China had already ported the iOS version of the game to the Android platform. And within five days, the game had been downloaded more than six million times in China on jailbroken Apple devices. Within the first 24 hours, a cracked version was available in China. Within two hours of the ANZ soft launch, the first pirated version of the game appeared in China. Zombies 2 soft-launched in Australia and New Zealand before its global launch. Other challenges PopCap faced involved piracy. The studio was able to remedy this by communicating with Apple and the media to raise awareness about what was happening, and he encouraged independent developers entering the Chinese market to do the same should a similar thing happen to them. On closer inspection, the top three best-selling apps in the app store all suffered from rating manipulation. Liu said PopCap had not anticipated that competitors would coordinate a rating attack on the game. Zombies 2 launched on the iTunes App Store in China at number one, but within weeks of its launch its five star rating dropped to two, despite it still being the second top-grossing game in the country. One such challenge is that of competitors manipulating the game's star rating on app stores in an attempt to discourage people from buying it. Speaking at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco today, Liu said China is a very large and powerful mobile market, but it also has its own challenges. Zombies 2 became one of the biggest mobile hits in China, the studio first had to deal with piracy, a fragmented mobile market and attacks from rating manipulators, according to the general manager of EA Mobile in China, Kun (Leo) Liu. Before PopCap's plant-based strategy game Plants vs.
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