DISQUS

Kim Lindholm · 1 year ago

Antti, we're not exactly as lazy as to redirect traffic from playray.be to Playray France and/or Holland and call it another country :)
Playray Belgium is actually a fully localized experience, with campaigns and competitions targeted at belgian users only. Even the site content is in the process of being adapted to the local dutch and french dialects (flemish and wallonian). The service is promoted with a "local tone" on TMF, MTV and in local tabloids(websites in the french and dutch regions of the country. Yes, we even had to re-record the dutch voiceover in our TV ads because they sounded too "hollands", which pretty much describes with one example the differences between Belgians and their neighbours despite sharing the same language.
Everything has ofcourse not been completely "localized" yet, and what the the local flemish and wallonian sites do share with the neighbouring playray countries is the community. I.e. players choosing the wallonian language on playray.be can play against users in France, and players that choose flemish meet dutch users in the gamerooms.

If anyone of you have any experience from Belgium or similar bilingual regions, I'd appreciate any help/feedback to improve the experience even more!

- Kim Lindholm / Apaja

Antti Vilpponen · 1 year ago

Kim, my bad - did not look carefully enough at the URLs. But you are correct about the small differences in the cultures that in the end, unfortunately for companies, make a big difference in the user experience.

Asmo · 1 year ago

Not commenting anything in detail but at least the current figures are looking a bit better than the numbers from 2006.

We're not going to open new countries in the near future with the same pace as in the recent 12-18 months (even though the new country launches aren't the key factor in our cost base with our current model) while we're going to focus more on developing the existing markets.