I'm interested to hear from some developers who get a decent proportion of their sales from non-English speaking countries, and developers who've translated their game specifically for localization in other countries, and what you feel your Return On Investment is for these markets is. There are a lot of languages out there. And not all have a market for western games. Assuming you're hoping for at least moderately successful worldwide sales on your game, what languages do you think are 'must-haves' for targeting for localization?
Not a good idea to translate, the main maket is the US. If you reach the top 25, you can think to translate in French but your sales will not grow... This is really hard to sell in the appstore. If you app don't reach a top 25. You will sell very small quantity... And this is really hard to reach the top 25.
In console game dev localisation the acronym 'EFIGS' was always the buzzword I heard. It means English, French, Italian, German, Spanish. If you look at the non-english speaking stores it seems most charts are dominated by games where the descriptions at least have been translated. This is of course far easier to do than translating the whole game.
This is incorrect. I had my game translated to French, and the sales did increase noticeably. I also did Spanish and Italian...Spanish got some more sales, Italian not so much. The cost was less than $100 so it was more than worth it, and I didn't reach the top 25. However the best investment was translating the App Store description to Japanese. This made sales in Japan significantly higher ever since I did that, and for some reason, for the last month or so, Japanese sales have been twice as high as US sales. I also had the App Store description translated into Dutch, but that had zero effect. --Eric
That's a hard question. For our games, we decide to fully translate them in 10 languages. ( English, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese and Korean ) Why 10 languages? We believe it is preferable to provide other languages. Some developer think that translating a game costs a fortune. it's false. If some developers choose only the English language is a matter of simplicity (and maybe laziness in the coding process) I have seen a lot of games on the app store in english only with so few words they can be easily translated into several languages for a few hundred dollars. We believe that offering multiple languages is a proof of quality and respect towards the foreign customer. (that's a important point) Maybe it did not impact the sell in some countries, it's truly hard to say, but if the cost of translation is low, it is a good deal for everyone.
Well, this is not always a bad idea. However the issue is the quality of the translation. So, for a budget of $100, you can get 4 translations ( eg Elance) but how to be sure the translations are not poor? A poor translation can hurt your sales! I'm French, and I can see the poor translations of the French AppStore. So I'm thinking you don't have to translate your game for the first release. If you reach a top 25/50 in US , then you can decide to translate. In this case, a good idea should be to use two translators per language (one for the translation, the other for fixing the translation). About top 25. (please read top 25 in one category)
This is very good to know. Thanks for your info! We did update iPharaoh this morning with two additional languages (Japanese and Korean). We plan to update it with other additional languages as well. My suggestion is Japanese, French and Spanish are necessary to reach large market. Since Japanese market is the second largest market in the world (and its app store is also growing to be like no. 2). I don't need to mention French and Spanish, lol
We're doing localization in: English (of course), Spanish, French, Japanese/Chinese and German. I think is a good idea to provide localization for the games regardless if that generate a raise in your numbers or not. That means your company, your product, cares of the user. At least from my perspective.
Agreed. Translating into a local language probably doesn't provide an instant boost in visibility -- users still have to find your app in the iTunes app store first. But it does mean that once they find your app, they get to read about it in their native language and know that the developer is paying attention to them.
Also you could consider a new art design according to the country sometimes. China is a good example of a new UI for localization. Well, it's a whole new market for most of us I think. At least for our company and for me.
Those languages are definitely a good start. Japan is quite strong too. We've found this too. Don't snub non-English speaking regions. If nothing else, you could release a version 1 that's English only and get some help from your customers to translate. I don't have much data on this either, but I'm sure adding localizations has helped our apps, even if it was just good-will help. I'm certain we've seen enough extra sales to warrant the extra work though. The main issue is getting your app/game ready for localization. Once you've done that, the actual localization isn't too hard. Some more info here (relating to Mac apps): http://wilshipley.com/blog/2009/10/pimp-my-code-part-17-lost-in.html English 80.9% German 8.1% French 3.2% Japanese 2.6% Unknown / Other 2.2% Dutch 1.5% Spanish 0.9% Norwegian 0.8% Italian 0.5% Danish 0.5% Swedish 0.5% Chinese 0.3% Portuguese 0.3% Based on Wil's stats, you'd be an idiot not to cover German and French. And if you've done German and French, adding other languages becomes easier.
On 75 % of our games we translated in EFIGS and it's really interesting. As for example on My Brute we have a huge Hispanic and Spanish community. Another factor is adding more languages give you more chance to be successful, I mean we have real cultural differences and it's difficult to understand all markets. You can be very surprised that sometime your game is a real success in some territories, and on others it's not working at all. For example on BaDaBoo, it was crazy in all European countries, not in the US at All.
For the iPhone/iPod touch applications we have to consider many different factors for each market/country we want to conquer: familiarity with the English language, local App Store size, iPhone/iPod touch owners, cultural context etc. The point of Vincenzo78140 is very true and interesting. It's very surprising to know the results of our customers; some of them are succesful in Japan, some in Italy, some in Spain, Germany, Russia, Sweden. You never know what's going to happen and how the customers will react. For this reason, if your app has potential, we highly advice to translate at least the App Store description. We focused our business on iPhone/iPod touch apps translations. Since the launch of the App Store we worked on more than 500 applications. Based on our customers' results and on the dozens of reports available over the Internet, we advice to translate your application into these languages (in order of importance): - German (5%) - French (4%) - Japanese (4%) - Spanish (3%) - Italian (3%) - Dutch (1%) - Swedish (1%) - Chinese (no results availabe yet) Enclosed in parenthesis, the iPhone market share of each country. The first 6 languages are supported by the App Store from the day of its launch and, logically, they are the most requested from our customers. We didn't get any stats/results about the Chinese market yet, but we'll receive some information very soon. Certainly it's interesting to imagine 1.3 billion people purchasing your application, but the fact that Need For Speed (#1 in the Chinese App Store) got only 10 reviews in one week makes me doubt at this moment. I also believe the Russian market has a great potential. Some of our customers had interesting results translating the in-app text into Russian. Danilo. DYS: Translations.
This is simply great information! Thanks for all of us to know! I'm looking forward to seeing your results in China!
