For years, launching a game internationally followed a simple formula. Pick a country, identify its dominant language, translate the text, and ship. It was tidy, predictable and increasingly out of step with how people actually find and enjoy games.
Today, a player in Dublin might spend their evenings immersed in anime and K-pop, while someone in Manila follows British comedy and indie games from Scandinavia. Where a person lives tells you very little about what they watch or play.
Location Is a Poor Predictor of TasteÂ
Streaming platforms, social media and online communities have made it effortless to explore cultures far beyond your own. Audiences now form around shared interests, and those interests travel freely across borders.
This is the opening premise of Keywords Studios’ newsletter on expanding player bases through localization, which argues that players are increasingly grouped by communities and cultures rather than geography. For studios, the implication is significant. A game does not have to be reinvented to find a global audience, but the way it is introduced to each audience deserves far more thought than a final-stage translation pass.
Look for Emerging Audiences, Not Just Emerging Markets
Publishers often ask which countries to invest in next, and the instinctive answer leans on language. Yet understanding a language is not the same as wanting to play games in it, and a similar title’s success in one region does not guarantee yours will repeat it. The more useful question is where the emerging audiences are, and why a particular game resonates with them.
Recent hits show how far a culturally specific game can travel. Black Myth: Wukong, an action RPG rooted in the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West, sold more than 10 million copies within three days of release.Â
A report on the third quarter of 2024 credited the game’s global popularity with helping drive an almost 21% year-on-year rise in overseas revenue for China-developed games, which reached US$5.17 billion. That figure covers Chinese games as a whole across all overseas markets, not a single title in the West, but it shows the appetite that exists for work with a strong cultural identity. The newsletter also points to rapidly growing audiences across the Middle East and South-East Asia. Before committing to a new language, the sensible step is to consult local experts and check whether players already engaging in English might genuinely prefer their own language.
Preserving Culture or Meeting Players Halfway
A common assumption is that localization means smoothing away anything unfamiliar. In practice, those differences are often exactly what draws audiences in.
Studios face a genuine strategic choice: bring the player closer to the game, or bring the game closer to the player. Sometimes an audience is more receptive to a distinctive source culture than its creators expected.Â
Jagex’s CEO told The Game Business that RuneScape: Dragonwilds, with its very British humour, had long been assumed to suit Western players. Yet after a version for Chinese players was released, 41% of first-week sales came from Chinese buyers, which he said challenged long-held assumptions about cultural fit. In other cases, players need extra context, or certain elements need adapting before the experience feels natural.
The decision can go well beyond vocabulary. In one project described in the newsletter, a team reviewing an Arabic setting for historical authenticity ended up asking whether a particular brand of cigarettes would have existed in that place and period at all. That kind of detail is where localization shifts into what the industry calls culturalization, ensuring a game world feels believable to the person exploring it. MultiLingual magazine has highlighted Animal Crossing as a strong example, noting how the tone and rhythm of its Animalese speech were adjusted to suit each audience.
Small Technical Problems, Big Experience Gaps
Some localization issues have nothing to do with word choice. A translated instruction that overflows the screen can sour the experience just as quickly as a poor translation.
Technology can help teams spot these problems sooner. A developer building in English could run an early machine-translated build to see how the interface behaves in Chinese. It would not be a finished localization, but it can reveal layout failures and broken instructions long before launch, early enough to bring in the right specialists. Handled well, technology takes care of routine mechanics, leaving experts more time for storytelling, nuance and authenticity.
Practical Steps for Studios
For teams planning an international release, the lessons point to a few clear habits:
- Involve localization early. Decisions about characters, environments and interface design shape the global experience long before translation begins.
- Research audiences before languages. Local specialists and market data can reveal where genuine appetite exists.
- Use technology as a diagnostic tool. Early machine translation can expose problems, with human expertise refining the result.
The Takeaway
The audience for any game is already global. What remains in the studio’s hands is whether the experience lands as intended for each player who discovers it, and studios that treat localization as a strategic discipline rather than a final checkbox are far better placed to deliver that.
