Which Languages Should You Localize Your Game?

Localizing a video game is always beneficial. While many players around the world understand English or Chinese, which are among the main languages used in video games these days, there is a deeper emotional connection when playing a game in your native language.

Sometimes studios ask us which languages they should localize their game into. Well, it depends. There is no definitive answer, but we can share a few tips that may help with that decision.

When deciding which languages to choose for a game, we believe you should analyze:

• The most profitable markets for the video game industry
• Steam reviews and wishlist count
• Your community

Developers want their game to thrive financially. And for this, of course, they look at the most profitable markets, like the ones below from the top gaming countries in 2025.

This specific data shows the top six countries in terms of overall gaming revenue last year. China was close to surpassing the United States in terms of revenue, highlighting the growing power of the Asian gaming market. Taking this data into consideration, most developers will choose to localize their games into languages that cover the largest markets, such as those used by the biggest gaming companies: English, Chinese (mostly Simplified), Japanese, Korean, and German.

Then there is EFIGS, an acronym that stands for English, French, Italian, German (already mentioned above), and Spanish. We will come back to it later.

The languages mentioned above are high-impact and cover the most profitable markets. Choosing these languages may drive more ROI (Return on Investment). Monthly Steam data corroborates the importance of EFIGS and CJK. As you can see below, 7 out of these 8 languages appear in the Top 10 Most Used Languages on Steam (March 2026).

However, this data does not mean that you must localize your game into these languages. Depending on your budget and audience, there are several factors that can help you decide which markets to focus on first and how to use your budget wisely.

Imagine the following scenario:

You are making an RPG, which is one of the most played game genres in the world. You have analyzed the most profitable markets and the most used languages on Steam.

As an extra resource, you can use a tool called SteamScout. This tool allows you to analyze Steam reviews in a simple way and better understand where your target players come from.

For this article’s purpose, we will analyze three of the best (and most profitable) RPGs in history: Baldur’s Gate 3, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and Cyberpunk 2077

We will take a look at the Top 10 languages in Steam reviews using SteamScout. The idea is to get a better overview of the reviews players leave on these specific games and to understand which markets are the most popular for this genre by looking at the total number of reviews and the percentage of positive and negative reviews by language. We will focus on Positive reviews for this test.

Results

As you can see, these games received a great deal of positive reviews in the languages mentioned above (mostly EFIGS, Simplified Chinese, and Korean). It is interesting to note that Italian does not appear in the top 10. It is still an important language and market (included in the acronym EFIGS), but if the budget for your RPG is tight, this may be a market worth reconsidering.

On the other hand, by looking at the reviews highlighted in red, we can see that several players (between around 12% and 30% of the reviewers across the three games) used Turkish, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), and Russian. The data indicates that players from these markets enjoy this genre, which is why these are strong languages to consider for localization.

It’s important to build an audience for your game. If your game sparks players’ interest, they will probably want to play it (and buy it) upon launch. The more wishlists your game has, the more it will likely sell.

You should pay attention to where these wishlists come from. Steam also tells you where your traffic is coming from. This is another great tool to help you decide where to get started. If your game is getting traffic from a specific country, it’s a good idea to localize it into that language, especially for indie games.

Let’s look at the example below. The following graphic shows the Steam wishlists per country for an indie game on early stage:

Of course, this can change as the game continues to be developed and reaches other markets, but if we were asked now which languages the game should be localized into, we would recommend Portuguese (Portugal and Brazil) and Spanish (Latin American) as Tier 1, Traditional Chinese and Russian as Tier 2, and Turkish as the final tier.

If you have the budget, we recommend localizing your game’s Steam page into the most popular languages mentioned at the beginning of this article, because Steam works pretty much like Google does. This will allow your game to get organic traffic from the languages of the countries you localize your Steam page into.

Steam’s algorithm works with keywords (but not only). And if your Steam page is in English, then chances are it will be very hard to show up on the front page in Germany if players don't use their Steam page in English, but in German. The same applies to other markets.

If you are playing it safe and want to be wise with your budget, then just listen to your community! Your community can be heard across many channels: Discord, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, or Reddit. If you have been posting about your game in a Chilean community, and players are often engaging with your Steam page through visits or wishlists, then consider translating your full game into LATAM Spanish.

We hope we have managed to help you choose which languages to localize your game into. It’s important to localize a game so it reaches the most profitable markets, but it’s also important to let the game go where players want it to go. Steam reviews and wishlists can help you understand the markets your game is reaching. And some genres definitely work better in certain markets than in others, and localization is a great tool to help you understand that.