Chinese game localization studio Yodo1 adds 9 more Western partners as it passes 5m active users

Chinese game localization and publishing startup Yodo1 has topped 5 million active users on its platform and plans to foster additional growth by partnering with nine Western game developers to bring their titles to China.

Yodo1 launched its gaming platform this summer with the introduction of a localized version of Hero Academy. It also announced that it had teamed up with Handy Games to bring its titles into the country. Since then it has helped push three of its partners games to the top of the Chinese version of Apple’s App Store.

The latest batch of developers and their respective games includes:

• Defiant Games: Ski Safari
• XMG Studios: Powder Monkeys
• TouchTen: Infinite Sky – Sky Beauty
• Touch Village: Dragons Rage 2 and Chin Up
• Red Rocket Games: Hank Hazard
• Mongol Content: Magnet Boy
• App Minis: Design This Home
• Nom: Wrath of Olympus, Sushi Swipe and Coin Blaster:  Monster Bash

Interest in Yodo1’s services has been quite strong, and the startup plans to continue to announce new partners as it grows.

“We’ve got about close to 100 game studios that contacted us after the initial launch,” CEO Henry Fong told The Next Web. “The 9 game studios that we’re announcing today are really the cream of the crop that we’ve selected to work with.”

Moving forward, Yodo1 plans to make things easier for game studios by releasing SDKs and APIs that will let developers do some of the on-boarding work themselves.

Since getting its start last November, Yodo1 has come a long way. It had just 9 employees at the start of 2012. Now its headcount has passed 100, and the company recently moved offices because it had outgrown the space.

“We’ve been growing like wildfire, at the same time, trying to keep up with demand,” Fong said, adding that the company is trying to systematize its growth to keep from moving too fast.

Fong went on to note that getting off the ground wasn’t easy, and he credited early partners like Robot Entertainment and Handy Games for “taking a bet” when it was young.

Localization appears to be going quite well for the startup. Fong said that some Chinese gamers have been surprised to learn that the games they’ve been playing are from overseas developers.

Yodo1 picked up $2 million in a seed funding round led by the Chang You Fund in June. The company’s looking for further investors, but it’s not in any rush for more money.

“We’ve got enough traction that we’re not in a rush to get additional funding. That said, we’re always looking for the right investment partners that provide strategic value, definitely above and beyond the funding,” he said, noting that he gets about 1-2 unsolicited calls from prospective investors every week.

“There’s definitely no lack of interest, but…it’s never easy getting the right investors that share our vision of how to build out the company,” Fong added.

Being able to choose from investors is a good problem to have, and, with just a year under its belt, Yodo1 still has plenty of room to grow once it finds the right ones.

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