The Wall Street Journal just wrote about our gaming client Small Giant Games and the success they had with localization of their game OddWings Escape.
Many mobile game developers and publishers are asking themselves what languages they should translate their game into to find international success. This article describes how a thought-out localization strategy can help a game reach 1 million downloads and a TOP 10 position in several international app stores within a week of launching.
You can read the first section below or the full article on WSJ's website (registration needed).
Translating Videogame ‘OddWings Escape’ Helps It Soar
Releasing puzzle game ‘Oddwings Escape’ in 15 languages simultaneously boosts sales
“Oddwings Escape” es un nuevo juego de vuelo.
On the day of its release, the flying puzzle game “Oddwings Escape” quickly ascended to the top of the charts in Spain. Finland’s Small Giant Games Oy, which initially developed the mobile game in English, traces the successful takeoff to a simple decision: From the get-go, it made the game available in Spanish.
The small Helsinki-based studio simultaneously released the set of stitched, inflated birds donning tennis shoes in 13 other languages, including French, German and Portuguese, with apparently similar results.
As of Thursday, one week after the global launch, “Oddwings Escape” had slipped to No. 2 on the Spanish chart of iPad game downloads, but it was a clear leader in France, Belgium, Poland, Finland and Egypt. The game, which ranked 14th in the U.S., has been downloaded more than a million times, the company said.
Small Giant isn’t the first mobile-game company to translate its products into multiple languages. But in an industry where studios typically wait to see how the English versions of their mobile games fare in the U.S. before investing in translation services, it is among the first to orchestrate a large, multilingual launch.
