Is app localization worth it?

I don't know what your app is like, but if it's text-heavy, you might want to look into localization. Otherwise, probably not.

We didn't localize v1.0 of our app because it's (hopefully) intuitive enough for most people to figure out.

Although it's is old, check out the sales data that the guys at Firemint published on Flight Control sales. That should give you an indication of the kind of international sales you can expect for that type of game.

At a minimum, you could localize the App Store description for your target countries.

 

You can localize your graphics just the same. It's no problem to prerender the text into the graphics, but you have to do them for every locale you want to support. Thus, it would be quite some work, depending on how many graphics with text you got.

 

So not actually the same then.

I would recommend not localising version 1.0. - we localised our title Turbo Duck into French, German, Italian and Spanish. We used a professional localisation company (not too costly as not too much text). We didn't do a Japanese version yet the game sold 5 times as much in Japan as in any of the countries we did do localisation for.

I would suggest launching the app and if there is any significant sales in non-english speaking territories then consider localising.

 

I had generally good results having the app store description translated. The game itself, hard to say...probably not so much. But the description, for sure, especially Japan...sales went way up there after the description was translated, though the game itself has no Japanese in it.

--Eric

 

I could find useful info about this topic here.