Kameru - The Frog Who Leapt To China
Video games are just one of those mediums with the power to unite players regardless of their background. But what, you might ask, does a French indie game studio have in common with a Chinese trading card game website? Here’s the story of how our little froggy friend made the leap into China.
Kamaeru: A Frog Refuge is all about creating coziness for your amphibian pals. The aim of the game is to foster a froggy sanctuary and restore the biodiversity of the environment. Inside Kamaeru, you’ll spend most of your time interacting with adorable NPCs, photographing frogs, breeding them and planting native crops to ensure their little abode continues to thrive.
We’ve worked closely with the Humble Reeds team for some time now, spearheading their entry into the Asia market - namely Japan, Korea and China. With such adorable aesthetics and casual-approachable gameplay, we knew that the game would be a hit in this region as long as we were speaking to the right audience.
One of our biggest highlights this year was facilitating a collaboration between Kamaeru and a large Chinese gaming news website called Iyingdi. Iyingdi, also known as 旅法师营地 (Lü Fashi Yingdi), primarily produces gaming content with a niche focus on trading card games and digital card games. Readers flock to their site to consume a range of content including game reviews, previews, strategies and community discussions. In recent times, they’ve also started following the independent scene and promote and sell indie games on their platform.
Instantly you can see the first thing that both Kamaeru and Iyingdi have in common - a frog! The site reached out to us with a collaboration proposal, which we discussed. The end result was a mutual exchange whereby they would offer promotion of Kamaeru on their website and in exchange, the Kamaeru frog mascot would get a magical transformation into a witch frog a.k.a the mascot of Iyingdi. To further this collaboration, Kamaeru keys were also offered as part of a giveaway to both reward and welcome members of the Iyingdi community to try out Kamaeru.
The timing also couldn’t be more perfect as all of this transpired during the spooky season of Halloween. The article on Iyingdi about the collaboration received more than 600 replies from their community with several exclaiming how cute Kamaeru was and how much they enjoyed the photography and crossbreeding gameplay. We loved that a shared passion for frog mascots is how we were able to bridge the gap between the Chinese gaming community and our friends over at Kamaeru. Partnerships can take all sorts of unexpected shapes and forms but we believe the best ones stem from passion and a shared interest. We’re incredibly happy to have helped these two frogs find each other and make friends, and isn’t that what Kamaeru is all about in the end?
