One of the early revolutionaries in thinking about game development as a process was Mark Cerny.  He evolved something that became known as “The Cerny Method” over a number of development cycles, the basic summary of which would be along the lines of “build one of everything you’re going to have in the final game, prove that it’s fun with those pieces, then throw all of that away and re-start the project knowing what you now know.”  That’s rough, crude, and over-simplified, but it was a watershed moment because it gave a clear shape to pre-production vs. production.

What are you trying to accomplish in pre-production?  Prove the fun.  How much do you need to build?  One of everything.  Should you carry over your architecture from pre-production into production?  No.  It was a clear and practically universal standard and goal that could be applied to a variety of projects.  It allowed developers to answer two key questions: do you know that the game you’re trying to build will be fun and if so how long will it take to build it.

The Cerny method evolved in turn into the notion of a first playable, then a vertical slice, and eventually in more agile environments into the shippable version of the game that you’re preparing each sprint.  In social/casual games, this morphed into the MVP – minimum viable product.  The goal is similar: build only as much of the game as you need to verify you are ready for the next phase.  In this case, it’s usually about going from production to beta, but the structure is almost identical.

Both the Cerny method and MVP are about mitigating risk.  Fail quickly, if you’re going to fail; reach your market as quickly as possible; optimize production knowledge about resources and requirements before committing.  MVP has the additional benefit in the free-to-play space of getting you to the point where you can begin to monetize, and therefore generate revenue, as quickly as possible.  In a rapidly evolving, high-growth market, launching early is not a liability; no one is quite sure what the experience is supposed to look like anyway.  In a highly competitive, red-ocean scenario, though, it can mean death.  If you’re trying to pull users away from other services that are already meeting their needs, you need to be at least as polished as your competition, or you will suffer from the comparison.

When social/casual games blew up, MVP was a critical tool for success and became part of the common knowledge of people working in the space.  Now that the market is reaching (or has passed) the saturation point, though, the question is whether MVP as an approach helps or hurts the success chances of projects.  As an optimization tool, I feel it is still a valid point of reference.  The key nuance that needs to be understood is that what qualifies as “minimum” has shifted.  Just as the Cerny method evolved from first-playable to vertical slice, MVP needs to encompass not just the core gameplay loop, but also the core viral hooks, monetization paths, and new-player on-ramping.

All of the “free” channels for driving user acquisition have dried up, at least compared to the scale on which you could leverage them previously.  When launching a product, then, you need to be sure that you’re competing at a level that is appropriate for today’s marketplace, not last year’s, and the bar gets raised day by day.  MVP isn’t obsolete, any more than the Cerny method is, but they’re tools that have to be intelligently applied.  User error can still do tremendous damage.

Not only is it a good idea to have a local partner when doing business in China, in many cases, it’s necessary.  Legally, foreign entities cannot own companies in China, so depending on the scale of business that you’re looking to do, you’re going to need someone on the ground to help you do it.

Things to look for in a partner:

• Language skills.  A surprising number of Chinese students opt to learn English, but unless you are a fluent speaker of Mandarin or one of the local dialects, your partner needs to be your interface with the feet on the ground.  This means not only knowing English (or whatever your primary language of business is) fluently, but also being a strong and effective communicator in the local language.  This can be difficult to test for, but if you’re going to be doing important work with folks in China, you’re going to want to have one or more fluent Mandarin speakers on your end, so they can help assess your potential partner’s skills.
• Willingness to work odd hours.  There are very few natural crossover points in the workday between China and the US (more in Europe), so either you or your partner needs to be willing and able to work around the time difference, preferably both.  With Skype and other voice/video chat tools, it’s easy to connect with people halfway around the world, but much better if they’re willing to interrupt dinner and deal with a crisis, or jump on at 3AM local time when the server goes down.
• Willingness to travel.  One of the most important things about any relationship is spending time together.  In order to do this effectively with partners in China, your senior people (including you, most likely) will need to spend a lot of time in China – not a day or two, but weeks and months.  It also helps to have your Chinese partners come and live with you for a while, particularly at the start of a project, so that they are part of the process of defining needs, standards, etc.  In general, most of the people I worked with in China loved this and saw it as a great opportunity, but make sure you get on this early as visas to/from China still involve a fair amount of red tape.
• Empathy.  This may seem like a strange one, but what you need out of your partner in China is the ability to understand and effectively represent your needs.  Empathy is a key skill and not one that is commonly foregrounded in business.  A partner who empathizes with you will be a much more effective advocate for you in the long run.
• Experience working with foreigners.  This isn’t strictly necessary, but it’s definitely a benefit.  There are a lot of cultural differences between Chinese and American culture, from obvious things like the importance of hierarchy to subtle things like how critiques are communicated.  This is going to put a strain on both sides, but if your partner has been able to make this work before, the chances are better that they’re going to be able to make it work with you.  By the way, don’t fool yourself into thinking you’re going to be immune to cultural differences.  You will make mistakes.  Lots of them.  Without knowing it.
• Willingness to speak truth to power.  Again, this is a tough one to test for, but there are going to be things that you need to be told that are going to be uncomfortable to tell you.  Whether it’s personnel issues or scheduling changes, conflicts with national holidays or bureaucratic requirements, cost overruns or missed deliverables, something’s going to go wrong, and when it starts to go wrong is when you want to hear about it, not when it’s too late to do anything about it.  In Chinese culture, especially, it is traditionally looked upon as disrespectful and rude to disrupt those above you on the totem pole; younger Chinese can be more flexible about this, but you need to look for this trait and then positively reinforce it whenever possible.

This is hardly an exclusive list.  Working with China is a long and complex topic, certainly too much to cover in any one blog post, but hopefully this will help you get started.