I've had some success localizing my Google Play / App Store description to other major languages. Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, German etc, have all provided a clear increase in downloads from users in those countries. However, localizing to Chinese, Japanese and Korean have so fair been a complete failure. Whats the deal with that? Anyone had any success localizing to Asian markets? If so how?
For one of my games my #1 market is Japan and #2 market is China. I suspect this is due to localization (Hong Kong and Taiwan are also decent). This is on iOS though. Japan is still a solid country for the Android version. I localized all in app content as well as meta data on the app stores for these countries. I believe it does help, but unless you can generate huge volume of downloads the return is questionable. In the end you still need a marketing strategy to penetrate those markets. But success is in the eye of the beholder. Some might consider success to be a minimum of 20k/downloads/day and some might consider it to be 10/DL/Day. FYI as far as China goes on Google Play : Google does not really have a Chinese market. China is comprised of dozens of independent app stores that control the distribution of apps in China. Google really is not a big contender over there. iOS is a different story as Apple is the only Apple distributor in China, but Android dominates China in general. If you truly want to penetrate asian markets : obtain an asian publisher (should you feel you have a quality enough app to gain a publisher's interest).
Thanks for your input! Localized app descriptions are only live on Google Play currently, about to submit a new version for App Store with localizations soon. So I guess we'll see what happens there. I won't be localizing the whole game, too text heavy, still downloads went up noticeably in localized western countries, and I was hoping for a little boost with asians countries too. Not really aiming for asian market though, the game is for english speakers, but just wanted to see if adding more app description languages would have an effect on asian downloads too. If nothing else to learn what works and what does not. So far none of the three asian languages has been very successful on Google Play, we'll see how it goes on App Store. As for "success", yes its relative of course. I only have about 70-100 downloads/day on Google Play, and the numbers have been around there for half a year or so with a slight increase in totals after localization. Most successful localizations have been German, Italian and Portuguese which used to have only a single download here and there, but now account for about 7% each of my downloads. Spanish and French have also seen a small increase. As for Asia, 0 from China, starting to see a small increase in Korea and Indonesia though. Japan has only been up for a few days so too early to tell there. Was mainly a bit curious to why there were absolutely NO downloads from China. So thanks for explaining why that is!
