Oceanhorn: localization later or immediately?

Is it worth publishing games in regional markets immediately localized or is it worth waiting for – we analyze the example of Oceanhorn.

Oceanhorn was a nostalgic project that made a bit of a mistake with the platform. On portable consoles, he would have been greeted much more warmly. This did not prevent the game from collecting good press and almost two thousand five-star reviews in the App Store.

With the cash register of the game, which the Finns from Cornfox & Bros. have been doing for almost two years, everything is also fine. FDG, which published Oceanhorn, says that the game paid for itself in less than a week of sales. So they are happy with the indicators and are not ready to completely abandon the use of the premium model.

The incident is that the game, which received a translation into Chinese and Portuguese at the time of release, was not translated into Russian. The omission was not corrected immediately. As Dmitry Shik, who translated the game into Russian for FDG, told us, the company simply did not have enough time to implement and test all languages for the global launch of the project.

For this reason, the localized version of the game was released only at the end of last March. Thanks to the translation, Oceanhorn re-received a feature on the main page of the Russian App Store and returned to the box office top 100 iPhone and top 40 iPad in Russia.

The question now is: was it worth publishing the premium game initially with localization or not?

To answer this question, let’s look at a couple of graphs.

This is the first week after the release of the English version in Russia. For some time after the launch, the game was promoted on the main page of the App Store (iPhone RU).

And this is the time period affecting the appearance of the Russian version and its features on the main page of the App Store, starting from March 28, 2014 (iPhone RU).

On the iPad, by the way, everything is much better. The game reached the box office top 40.

Thus, it can be assumed that only in a week of the Russian version of Oceanhorn FDG has earned up to $10 thousand in translation in Russia.

Now we return to the previously raised question: is it worth publishing large projects in a local language after the release of the English version in it, or is it better to immediately offer localization?

Since localization of a project that has already been featured in the App Store is a great reason to ask the Apple company to re-profile the project, it seems to us that the strategy “the first release in English in the world, and then a restart/update in local languages” is an excellent solution.

So you should not rush with localization.