ys wrote: It likely will be good for the overall sales. The only thing that I wish is that they don't make it another $100000 gap. I once wrote a post about localization costs for Yakuza. The estimates that I found from a professional localization company (who had worked for EA, Sega, Microsoft,...) was around 4000 euro for a text-heavy game.Hyo Razuki wrote: Do we really have to discuss the status of English as the world's lingua franca on here? Come on, you can answer that question by yourself. If Chinese was the lingua franca the game would have come out with Chinese dub instead of English and we would be writing Chinese on here.
I agree. Just like scientific works were written in Latin during medieval times and even up until the 1700's etc.south carmain wrote:If we're using total number of speakers as a reason to release the game in whatever language beside Japanese then they might as well just release it in China in chinese since that's where they'll get the maximum amount of speakers for one language.
Though not necessarily a lot more sales when you look at reports about the rampant piracy in China.
As for English, you could probably look a bit beyond native speakers. Where I grew up we have to study 4-5 different languages during our school time. Knowing three of them is often expected when you look for jobs, with English being one of the major ones. So you could include a few extra markets where people, especially gamers, at least have a "near-native" understanding of English.
The 841 million number includes all English speakers in the world not just native speakers. I should also probably point out that I was being sarcastic and I am fully aware that the English speaking market is more appealing than the Chinese market for multiple reasons including piracy, purchasing power and the fact that there aren't just 75 thousand PS4s sold in it and people don't primarily play online games.