I’m trying to decide what other translations make economic sense for Democracy 4. Its never a clear issue. There are some countries where sales are potentially high, but then most gamers speak English anyway, so the boost effect of a translation is small. Then there are countries that sales are entirely dependent on translations being available. Also some countries have higher piracy rates, meaning you are basically just making pirated copies better! Time to look at some stats. Obviously I cannot make any decision without stats. Yes, I may well be on the spectrum…
Here I am going to consider the arguments for translating into Korean, Chinese and Japanese. Which, if any, of these countries make sense as a potential translation target? One useful stat would be to look at Democracy 3s steam sales figures in each country, as a percentage of revenue, as this game is older so it has lifetime (not just early access) stats.
- China: 1% of revenue (Chinese translation available but added post-release. 5% revenue in prev year)
- South Korea: 1% of revenue. Not translated 2% in prev year
- Japan 0% of revenue. Actually to be precise: 0.478% of revenue. Not translated Yikes…
There are a bunch of countries where we do not have a translation with higher revenues such as these:
- Sweden. 2% revenue
- Norway 2% revenue
- Netherlands 2% revenue
- Denmark 1% revenue
But I think its fair to say that English is commonly spoken in those countries by gamers, and if not, they also have French or German to choose from, so not bad. The big question is picking between Russia, China and S Korea. Its worth noting that S Korea is a playable country in the game… so maybe this needs adding? So is Japan!
So to get really stupid, lets look at the population under 30 to get the total addressable market for each of our now 4 countries:
- Japan: 27 million
- China: 237 million
- South Korea: 13 million
Hmmm… not helpful. Maybe a better source would be to look at steam traffic in general, which I found on this page.
- Japan: 1.5% of traffic
- China: 22.7% of traffic
- South Korea 3% of traffic.
So frankly Japanese is looking like a bad idea. Untranslated sales were close to zero, and as a percentage of steam traffic, its really low for EVERYONE. South Korea is better, but still low. China might be a better bet. We DO have a swanky Unicode engine which will effortlessly render everything in Chinese and Korean… so it seems like that could be a good idea. I need to get a translation quote, and then look at the numbers a bit more, and then pace up and down and lose sleep some more. I’ve scheduled the stress and pacing for tomorrow…