Running for over three years, OneSky aims to help apps and games capture the global market by going multilingual. Headquartered in Hong Kong, OneSky has served over 1000 clients in U.S and Europe, including Plain Vanilla Games, Frogmind Games, JuiceBox, and Epic Games. Loki Ng, co-founder of OneSky, talks about testing the international market in this article.
To localize or not to localize, this is the question.
Fun is universal. A game can easily reach everyone in the world who is looking for joyfulness. But it is so difficult for a game developer to decide which language to localize first, given the chicken-and-egg scenario of users vs investment (I need users to justify translating or is it translation that’s holding me back from acquiring users). A logical step is to use minimal investment to test the market.
Is it Fit for the International Market?
Most of the games don’t know where to go at the very beginning, though some of them are easier than others, especially casual games with minimal words and minimal cultural elements. Take Angry Birds as an example: it is very easy for everyone in the world to understand the physics and the simple gestures in the game, regardless of the culture or country.
Games with elements like historical background or characters from fairy tales will have more difficulty deciding which countries to go to first. The more cultural elements, the higher risk they cannot perform well in particular countries. Sometimes, it is not about the game but simply because the players in particular countries are not familiar with the cultural elements. For this type of game, test the market in phases. Translation is much easier to implement and deploy before deciding to localize any graphics or storyline.
The Description Gateway
Instead of investing a lot doing market research in different countries, iTunes Store, Google Play, and Amazon App Store have made it super easy to test the global market feedback.
There are 28 languages on iTunes Store, 50+ on Google Play Store, and 9 languages on Amazon App Store. Store description is the players’ first encounter with the game before downloading it. It also act as the content to be searched by potential users. Non-English speakers, say Korean and Japanese players, might not be performing the search in English. There will be a group of potential players missing if the game is English only on the stores. By localizing the store descriptions, non-English speaking players will be able to discover the game and give it a try if they are interested.
Observing Traction
There are usually 300 words in the description for a game, which cost $30-$40 per language to translate. So for less than $150, you can test out user reactions of your game in 2-3 markets. This is far cheaper compared to doing market research in those countries.
The country-specific tractions will be observable after a few days of launching the localized versions of store descriptions. More resources can then be allocated to the localization engineering for particular languages and the marketing efforts in particular countries. It would be very cost-effective for a small game studio without many resources to expand to the global market with the correct and fast signals.
Cast Your Net
Start Small. Think Big.
Localized app store descriptions fare much better on the local app store compare to non-translated descriptions. Use this to your advantage to cast your net globally, and only commit to translating the full game once you’ve register a spike in downloads in a particular version.
You can check out OneSky’s website to learn more about high-quality localization of app-store descriptions and game content.
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