Guide for an indie developer:How to get money from your Steam game

v 1.0 10.01.2022
Having multiple languages is one of the most important success factors

Having multiple languages is one of the most important success factors

According to Steam’s documentation – 60% of the audience on the platform use a language other than English. Thus, by making only an English version you lose more than 50% of potential traffic and wishlist.

Steam officially supports 26 languages and, depending on your budget, you need to determine the number of localizations you will make.

To make the right and informed decision, GameSensor provides detailed statistics for the distribution of sales level of PC games depending on a user’s language.

Example of a graph

In this way, you can see in which regions (based on a language) the product is popular and its sales proportion. The statistics allow you to decide on the usefulness of financial investments in the game’s translation to each specific locale.

We also calculated in which languages there were more purchases. Top 10 languages:

  • 1.English;
  • 2.Chinese;
  • 3.Russian;
  • 4.Spanish;
  • 5.Portuguese (Brazilian);
  • 6.Turkish;
  • 7.German;
  • 8.Polish;
  • 9.Korean;
  • 10.French.

Important!

Due to the significant variations in prices in different regions, Koreans can buy a game for more money than Turks, even though there are fewer of them on the platform. At the same time, the number of Chinese users is so large that even with lower prices the sales proportion will be higher due to sales numbers. We will discuss this topic in more detail in separate articles on the website.
Having multiple languages is one of the most important success factors
GameSensor Man

Lifehack

You do not have to translate an entire game for it to become available to users of a specific region (according to language preference).
You can simply translate an interface and a game’s page on Steam and fairly specify that only the game’s interface is localized.