In October 2015, our studio Charlie Oscar released a digital board game Gremlins, Inc. While almost everyone in the team already shipped products before while working at other studios, this has been the first game of us working together as one team. The data below is based on the sales on 4 platforms: Steam, Humble, Sonkwo and GOG. The numbers are based on copies sold, not revenue collected, as we wanted to measure the audience – rather than the economic impact of a particular region.
EARLY ACCESS
The game has been in Early Access for a bit under 5 months, with over 20 feature and content updates. We started with 5 languages (English, German, French, Spanish, Russian) and sold the game at $9.99 (here and later, prices for US region are used; we adjust based on every region), selling a bit under 10K ocpies across all platforms.
In terms of localization content, the game has quite a few rules and card descriptions, as well as multi-linguage communication tools (e.g. a phrase "Good game!" is shown to each player in their own language), which at that time came to about 30K words per language.
Here's the distribution of sales by regions at the end of the Early Access period:
RUSSIA – 34%
USA – 20%
FRANCE – 8%
GERMANY – 6%
UK – 5%
For future reference: CHINA was 2%; JAPAN was 1%; and KOREA was 0.1%.
Takeaway:
* If you game has meaningful content (rules, dialogues, anything that is a part of UX), you cannot reach Asian customers unless you support the local languages – see changes in sales to these regions in the following periods;
* We were able to enjoy very strong support from RUSSIA because Russian is one of the native languages of our dev team, and all of our communication has been bi-lingual (EN/RU) from day one – every forum announcement, every patch note, every Steam announcement, all were released in 2 languages at the same time. We're pretty sure that if our team had native French, for example, then we would have been able to double or triple the share of FRANCE just as well.
THE FIRST QUARTER OF FULL RELEASE
Once the game transitioned out of Early Access, we increased the price to $14.99 and added 7 more languages: Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Polish, Czech, Italian, Brazilian-Portuguese and Ukrainian.
The sales in the first quarter following the full release (and new languages available in the game) changed accordingly:
USA – 20% (same share as in Early Access)
RUSSIA – 20% (a noticable dip thanks to increase from other regions)
CHINA – 16% (an increase of 8 times – due to localization becoming available)
JAPAN – 5% (an increase of 5 times – due to localization becoming available)
GERMANY / FRANCE – 5% each (more or less same share as before)
Takeaway:
* already at this point, after just one quarter of sales in the full release mode, we sold enough to China and Japan to pay for those localizations; there is no doubt for us, that both Chinese and Japanese languages must be no.2-3 for dev team's priorities, following English;
* sales to other regions where we invested into full localization have been lacking: Brazil, Czech Republic and Poland were all under 1%, with only Ukraine climing to the 2% share (but see more on Ukraine below).
THE REST OF 2016
The following two quarters of 2016 reflected the dynamics that we saw as we transitioned from 5 languages to 12, and from Early Access to full release: China was on the rise (for us as well as for everyone else on Steam, I suppose – additionally, we launched on Sonkwo, a Chinese platform offering Steam keys, around the same time, which added more exposure and more sales in the region); while a few other "language-dependent regions" also kept strong. Here's the breakdown of sales during Q3-Q4 2016:
CHINA – 23%
RUSSIA – 22%
USA – 16%
JAPAN – 7%
FRANCE / GERMANY – 5% each
The trends from the first quarter of full release continued to develop: RUSSIA, where we provided 24/7 community support and kept the engagement high, performed like a star; while CHINA grew from 16% of sales to 23% of sales; and JAPAN exceeded both FRANCE and GERMANY, becoming no.4 region.
Looking at the chart above, and considering that we supported 12 languages already, we wrote off any new languages for the foreseaable future – especially because there was no demand on the forums. No one was asking for, say, Korean (0.1% of sales) and only 2 people were asking for Turkish, while a lot more were saying "thanks!" for supporting Ukrainian, that yielded under 2% of sales.
CHINESE NEW YEAR 2017
With the arrival of 2017, we transitioned to the seasonal format of updating the game: every three months, we would introduce new music, new in-game visuals and a new pack of in-game items (all of that is free to users) celebrating the season, and giving players a good reason to come back to the game and try it all out.
The one irregular event that we agreed to do, was Chinese New Year 2017 at the end of January – based on the request of our Chinese partner Sonkwo, and based on the continued strength of sales to China. Simply put, we felt hat with so many users from China buying the game, we owe them something special for the holiday that's more important than Christmas over in China. And so we created a special Chinese New Year update with new, thematic music and visuals, as well as a special in-game item that was granted for free to all users just during that period.
And here's the sales for the entire Q1 2017 (take a seat):
CHINA – 47%
RUSSIA – 12%
