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[oodavid]

I'm starting to think about internationalisation in my game and am wondering if anyone has any statistics / anecdotal evidence as to the value of this?

It's a pretty heroic endeavour to support even just one language (I can barely speak English, and I am English!) so can only imagine that multiple languages must be even more of a challenge... I mean, if I asked someone to translate my game I wouldn't even know if they'd changed my characters name to "ArseFace McCunty" or something equally offensive!

I digress. What I'm trying to figure out is if non-English countries have seperate gaming microcosms and whether i18n is a good way to penetrate those markets.

[rnlf]

I guess, often especially young gamers are not very proficient in English. Especially in Germany (and probably also in other big (in terms of population count) countries as well), people are used to getting localized content, even with dubbed voice acting.

I am not sure however, how that translates into the indie world, as people who buy indie games are of a different kind than people who consume only AAA titles.

But adding the ability to add different languages later on isn't too much work, so the actual localization can be done much later. Just read up about the different ways languages treat numbers, dates are possibly things like plural forms of words and use a good library to allow for localization. It's a bit of an effort, but it's not too much work either.

If your game takes off, you might find your community doing all the localization work for you, if you give them the power to do so...

[Riho]

In my (non gaming related) experience the English language skills are quite low in some bigger countries. For example South America mostly speaks spanish and portugese, I guess bigger markets also include Russia, China, Japan, Germany, France, etc. So if you get a foothold in those markets, that could potentially increase your sales quite a bit.

But, as an indie you got to take into consideration that besides the game translation (which you have to update with every update you do to the game) you'd also have to offer customer support in that language. And that might be too much for an indie to handle.

[Sanojian]

It is more important than you might think.  If you look at sales data in different markets you will notice a real bias towards localized games.

Deciding what languages to target can be daunting.  Here is a blog post talking about this subject.

http://localizedirect.com/blog/which-languages/

Full disclosure: this is my day job

[Sik]

There's also the fact that a player may be proficient in English, but still refuse to buy a game that isn't localized because it would be seen like the developer doesn't care about that player (I've already seen anecdotal evidence of this). Of course a bad localization is even worse than no localization...

[Chris Koźmik]

I would say "probably not". I have been doing localization in some of my games, and so far results were unimpressive. The problem is acquiring players. Just because your game is in a non English language alone won't make any difference, you also need to find a way to find the players who speak that language. And if you don't know the language yourself how can you promote it?

Second thing, there is *WAY* less non English players that you think. Most (or amost all) serious gamers know English already. Just because it's not their native language does not matter (that much).

I think there are some cases where localization for an indie makes sense (for example I still do it for some of my games), but these are exceptions.


TIP: If you go for localization use GetText, it's insanely easy and convenient.