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Localization đź“–

Translations

The more languages you have available in your game, the more people will be able to play and enjoy it. Localization will improve engagement for players as they will be able to understand what is happening in-game, especially for any game that has text. Since Poki has a worldwide audience, games with text that aren’t localized can struggle in countries where players don’t understand the language. That’s why it’s really important to think carefully about localization when creating your game!

Is localization right for your game?

If your game is in one of the following groups, you may want to consider localization:

  • Story games
  • Clicker and Idle games
  • Quiz Games
  • Any text-based game, or a game has features that are explained through text (guns, mechanics, power ups etc.)

Outside of these groups, the language of your game may have less of an effect on its success and may not warrant localization.

Prepare your game for localization

Localization can be time-consuming and expensive if you haven’t prepared your game for it. To prepare for localization, ensure that the text you want to translate in your game is in one location, for example a JSON file. This will avoid you having to find all in-game texts one-by-one when translating.

Major language groups

Poki has millions of players from all over the world, so make sure you cover as many bases as possible. However, you should also consider if the benefit is worth the cost. We recommend you consider covering the main languages in this order to reach a big audience:

  1. EFIGS (English, French, Italian, German, Spanish). First, cover this group to reach a broad audience in Europe, North America, and parts of South America. You may also want to consider Turkish, as it is an increasingly popular locale.
  2. CJK (Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Korean). Second, consider covering the Asian market. The Asian gaming market is huge, but the languages are more time-consuming and expensive to translate into - so only do this if you are confident it will be worth it.
  3. Brazilian-Portuguese and Russian. Consider these last to cover the rest of your basis around the world.

Interested in more details on how to pick languages for your game? Here’s a good video from YouTuber AuroDev on choosing languages to translate your game into.

How to display languages
The user interface for picking a language in your game can be as simple as a toggle in the menu. By default, we suggest serving the game in the player’s browser language with a behind-the-scenes check. DataDisplay