Localization as Marketing - “How to make them notice me?”

The world we live in today has many highlights and many, many, many,many,many,many manymanymanymanymanymanymanymany…[ERROR] [REBOOTING…] ...many flaws. On one hand, it’s probably easier than ever to express yourself artistically for the world to see. On the other, there have never been so many people vying for the same audience.

That fascinating dichotomy is what facilitated the SEO hellscape digital storefronts like Steam have turned into, with short descriptions that are over 50% buzzwords and game genres. As a scholar of the world, I'm fascinated by the evolutionary pressure that resulted in this.

As a creative translator, if I have to build one more sentence with "cozy", "roguelike", and/or "action-packed", I swear to the many-tongued gods...

So how do you make your game POP? How do you make a potential buyer going through their 12-item daily suggestions list spend a few extra seconds on your game's page and, hopefully, make them click that all-important wishlist or download button? Well, you're asking a translator, so the answer is to be expected:

Making a trailer with an honest gameplay showcase that places your game's strong point front and center, in order to immediately capture the window shoppers' attention, and brainstorming a minimally creative short description that doesn't make browsers wonder whether the page actually refreshed or if they're still reading the same item on their algorithmically optimized suggestion list.

Oh, and quality localization, of course.

Some languages, like the iconic FIGS acronym (French, Italian, German and Spanish) treat localization as a given. If their language is not present, something must be wrong. Others, like Portuguese and Chinese, have been growing into the expectation of localization in the last decade or so, by virtue of our massive consumer markets.

I can't speak for any other nationality, but we Brazilians love feeling seen and respected, so when a game goes the extra mile and launches day 1 with Portuguese localization, we notice. When our language features in the roadmap for future updates, we notice. When the promotional art assets have been reworked with clever taglines in Portuguese, we notice.

Developing games is cost- and labor-intensive, of course, so an indie developer working alone on their first game might not have the resources to implement some of these attention hooks, and that's fine. But we urge you to spend a few braincells on ways to acknowledge the greater gaming community outside of your native language and the obligatory English version, even if it's something as simple as a poll post on social media about which languages interested gamers would like to see your game translated into. If you're feeling fancy, buy a few foreign snacks and film yourself trying them. For Brazilians, that usually does the trick.

Localization is an expense, and extra money is increasingly hard to come by for us little people, but you should never underestimate the multiplicative effect of putting your best foot forward when introducing your project to an entire new country. In an ideal world, every single person would have every single game available in a language they grew up with, but while we’re working on that, even the cold, soulless metric of Return on Investment can give insights on how much catering to the native speaker population of a country can boost your sales.

Around 16% of Brazilians have a monthly income above R$5,000 (905 USD). Is that too few? Yeah… But it’s still over 30 million people. Another fun statistic is that only 5% of the ENTIRE population can understand English.

Even if we’re generous in our napkin math, accounting for higher-income people having easier access to bilingual education, that’s still many millions of people who might have disposable income for gaming, but wouldn’t be able to enjoy anything too complex or narrative-driven. Spending a few thousand USD/EUR on a good boutique loc agency (like Wordfoxes!) can net you tens of thousands of sales where there might have been none.

For a more data-heavy look into countries with slightly better wealth distribution, I recommend this article by Simon Carless, with insights from Hooded Horse’s Tim Bender.

As a general rule, just do your best. Treat your project lovingly and consider each added language as an upgrade. Don’t just cram your text through ChatGPT in order to tick an extra box at the storefront, and definitely don’t ask it “how do you say <POPULAR KEYWORD> in <TARGET LANGUAGE>” and slap the result after a colon on the game name. Gamers recognize effort. Sometimes we even reward it.