Added japanese localization for my game 8 months after and here is how it went (numbers in the end)

Happy new year everybody.

I'd like to start this new year by sharing how adding Japanese localization impacted the sales of my game, Our Adventurer Guild. I hope these numbers will be useful for your own research and evaluation on whether to invest in localization.

The starting point:

Our Adventurer Guild is a tactical RPG with a lot of text—about 200k words, to be more specific. That means it would cost at least 20k USD to translate the game just going by a generous translation rate of 0.10 per word alone. At the time I was considering localization, I had only 3k wishlists from Japan, and the general consensus was that it wasn’t worth the investment since it was unlikely to pay off. However, when the game fully launched on April 12, 2024, it started with fewer than 5,000 wishlists but performed significantly better than those numbers would suggest. So I was willing to take another bet. My reasoning was that the game was something that has a good chance to find an audience in japan, because many popular tactical rpgs originated from japan. 20k USD was a lot of money but considering that it would be a tax deductible expense and the game having earned enough money where I could risk the investment, I decided to go with my guts.

The Translation work:

Thanks to a japanese player who was also journalist, I got into contact with an excellent translation team (Link to their homepage). They began working on August 21, estimating 2–3 months to complete the translation.. During that time we made some exchanges to clarify some details and at the halfway mark we started to implement the first part of the translation into the game to check how it plays inside the game.

There were issues. It seems adding japanese wasn't as straightforward as I thought it would be. Japanese letters are on average bigger than latin letters so there were a lot of places where it didn't quite fit. Also, there were some technical issues with the way how unity handles multiple fonts that share the same same letters. Fortunately, all of the issues could be handled and the translation was finally complete in December and the update was released on November 9.

The numbers:

At the time when I decided to do the translation:

(Japan) Link

Units sold: 404,

Wishlists: 3223

Revenue(%): 1.7%

Units(%): 2.3%

Just before the localization update and 3 months after the announcement for japanese language support:

(Japan) Link

Units sold: 1632,

Wishlists: 11869

Revenue(%): 3.6%

Units(%): 4.6%

At the current time:

(Japan) Link

Units sold: 6927,

Wishlists: 14608

Revenue(%): 11.8%

Units(%): 15.9%

Things that might have affected the numbers:

The translation team was kind enough to send some keys to their journalist contacts in japan. As far as I know it resulted in an article in Gamesparks(Article).

The winter sale was just around the corner at the time when the update was released. The 25% discount most certainly encouraged Japanese gamers to try the game.

Conclusion:

So, was the localization worth it? Yes, absolutely.

Sales from Japan have already recouped the cost of the translation and will likely continue to boost future sales. It did well enough that I plan to include more languages for the future. I think I should prioritize the languages where english isn't as common as in the european countries. That's one of the reason why I started with japanese.

I hope these insights and numbers are helpful to you!