I mostly agree. The real measure of an investment, however, is the opportunity cost: What else could I have done with those resources? Might it have yielded higher returns?

But as the author alludes, the company is much better positioned for "the next one," so the investment actually has yet to pay off and there's plenty of upside left. From that perspective it was a huge win, since it appears that he came close to covering his costs, and now the company has a competitive advantage.

(I'm the author) Just for the record, although it's hard to exactly quantify the extra amount earned from the localization, even a conservative estimate covers our localization costs and a small profit. You're right in pointing out that opportunity cost is the real cost.

If this was the only game I was ever going to make, I probably would have spent my time better on things other than localizing it nearly a year into its lifespan.

I think the most important point is that we left plenty of money on the table by not having the localization available on day one. The localization was launched very late into the game, and almost all revenue comes from the major promotional periods.

It will be interesting to compare results with the sequel to see if we have notably larger market share right from the start in the languages we choose to localize in, I think that will provide a little more conclusive data than this admittedly murky analysis.

I think localization is so important and reaches beyond just translating a few strings (though really -- even that is something many developers miss). It's really about the small touches in the experience, for ecommerce, items that ship, taking tariffs and import/export rules into account. currency. for games, small hints like background and music and so on.

This effort is great and its awesome to an effort that speaks to a variety of audiences

I see there have been several fan translations. Do you think it would have been better/cheaper/easier to have in-game support for adding translation patches and working with the community, rather than hiring professionals?

There is in-game support for adding translations, sort of. You just drop files into a folder and there you go. (This is in fact how our Russian and Korean translations turned up, fans had started working on them on their own, and then started emailing their work to us).

The only thing that requires a lot of heavy lifting is if that language requires a previously unsupported font (like a new Asian language), or if the new language has problems fitting in the User Interface.

As I said in the article, I would not consider fan translations a replacement for professionals so much as a supplement, although I guess this depends on the needs of your app/game. In my case we had a big story-based RPG with 45,000+ words, which is not a trivial exercise and there's all sorts of opportunities for it to go off the rails in ways that kill the sparkle (inconsistent grammar, poor or erroneous characterization, horrible translations of jokes, etc). Fans can and do produce great work, but you can't assume that's what you'll receive.

For languages you're really interested in targeting (for us our top priority was German) you don't want to roll the dice on that. But for "like to have" languages it's not a bad idea.