It is quite clear that a mobile application, released only in English, is unlikely to become successful in the market of the country where this language is not the main one. And if for some local applications, such as directories or taxi services, this is not critical, then casual games act short-sightedly, discarding the largest part of the world market. We ( Ackuna ) decided to see what percentage of the profits a team developing mobile games could miss, if we exclude countries where they do not speak English.

Two language strategies: Candy Crush Saga and Clash of Clans

Casual game Candy Crush Saga, according to App Annie , in 2014 became one of the most popular applications in the world. This is surprising, but in the App Store it was presented only in English and Japanese. Despite this, the app shows great success in the US, Germany, France and Brazil markets in terms of downloads and revenue on Google Play and the App Store. At the same time, Candy Crush Saga is not included in the top 10 popular applications in major markets such as Russia and China. But in China alone the number of smartphone users is almost three times more than the entire US population.
Does this mean that success is associated with focusing on the markets with the most solvent audience? Not necessary. Let's look at what path the Clash of Clans team chose, which became the most profitable gaming app of 2014. This product has the support of many languages: Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Spanish, Russian ... Such diversification has ensured him entry into the top 10 applications in the markets that show the highest rates of growth in revenues from mobile games - Japan, South Korea and Germany.
Apparently, the question is the ultimate goal of the developers. The creators of Candy Crush Saga made the company for sale, and were able, as we know, to successfully sell Activision Blizzard. The developers of Clash of Clans decided to focus on income from users of the application. To verify the reasonableness of such an assumption, we study the statistics.

Some statistics

According to the report of the company Common Sense Advisory, 87% of users who do not speak English, will not buy the product on sites with English-language interface. At the same time, even those users who are fluent in English will most likely prefer websites and applications in their native language. In total, there were about three quarters of such respondents. For Japan, this figure was 70%, China - 54%, France and Turkey - 61%, and for Germany - 58%.
However, this is more about the psychology of the user than about the money. Let's try to translate these figures into the language of dollars. At the end of 2014, the volume of the global market for mobile applications amounted to $ 33.7 billion (data from Strategy Analytics). According to statista.com , by the end of 2015, this figure should reach $ 45.37 billion.
The main part of the mobile applications market falls on games: from March to May 2015, mobile gaming applications accounted for 40% of downloads and 80% of total revenue. At the same time, the monetization of games is on average 4 times higher than that of other applications. According to Newzoo, mobile games will generate $ 30.3 billion in revenue in 2015.
By region, the picture is as follows: in June 2014, mobile game revenues amounted to 12.2 billion dollars in the Asia-Pacific region, in North America this figure was 4.9 billion dollars, and Western Europe - 3.2 billion. In Eastern Europe and Latin America, 0.63 and 0.51 billion, respectively.
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All to asia?

It is obvious that the Asian market of mobile games is the most interesting for developers today, where the main income according to SuperData is generated by Japan (6.2 billion dollars), China (5.2 billion dollars) and South Korea (1.3 billion dollars). At the same time, relatively small Japan, in which, according to eMarket, as of the end of 2014, there were 50.8 million smartphone users against 519.7 million Chinese users, brings the most revenue. It is not by chance that even the authors of Candy Crash Saga did not dare to go around this country with their attention.
The Japanese market is dominated by local developers ( App Annie data ), such as GungHo, which developed the Puzzle & Dragons game popular among local gamers. At the same time, Japanese users are very demanding on the service and quality of mobile games, which is directly affected by localization.
Applications from local developers also dominate the Chinese and South Korean markets. An important feature of the Chinese market is that there is no Google Play, and Android developers have to interact with local app stores, which often receive most of the revenue - 60-70% of the app.

Other markets

Of the other non-English-speaking markets that are attractive to developers, Germany can also be singled out (36.4 million users according to eMarketer), which ranked fourth in terms of mobile app revenue from iOS and seventh place on Google Play in the world by mobile apps for 2014. In addition, interesting markets that show the highest growth rates: India (123.3 million users), Brazil (38.8 million), Mexico (28.7 million) and Russia (49 million).
By the way, Russia is in 4th place in downloads from Google Play and in fifth place in downloads from the App Store in 2014. According to the data of Internet World Stats, there are more than 103.15 million Russian-speaking Internet users in the world, which is about 70.5% of the Russian-speaking population in the world. At the same time, among the Russians, according to the Levada Center, as of May 2014, 70% did not speak any foreign language, and only about 11% were fluent in English.

Final tally

Let's summarize all the data that was given above, and see what part of the income game developers lose, releasing their products exclusively with the English-language interface.
It is easy to see that English-speaking countries (USA, UK, Australia, etc.) provide a total of about ¼ of the global mobile gaming market in monetary terms. At the same time, only small Japan gives comparable figures - 1/5 of the entire world market.
Simply put, a developer who has released only the English version of his game, is forced to give up ¾ of potential income.
In fairness, it is worth noting that interface localization is a necessary, but not always sufficient condition for entering a new market. But without it, as mentioned above, local users in 70% of cases will refuse your product.


It makes no sense to give up ¾ all revenues, if it is possible (besides, completely free of charge thanks to translation crowdsourcing) to release a localized version for non-English speaking markets, especially those that are interesting in all respects, like Japan, South Korea or Germany? Speak to the user in his language - and you can at times raise the income from the application, covering those for whom English is not the most comfortable option for everyday communication.