Congratulations to Planet Crafter on Selling 1 Million Copies!

Congratulations to our friends at Miju Games on their remarkable milestone: Planet Crafter has sold over 1 million copies. We are proud and humbled to have been a part of this achievement. We know firsthand how awesome Planet Crafter is: the developers gave our linguists access to the EA build, and some of us clocked dozens of hours of playtime. We're gamers too, after all!

But since we're localizers, this achievement is interesting from our professional point of view as well. Let's estimate how much of this roaring success can be attributed to localization.

The game is available in 14 languages, and we at Riotloc took part in 12 of them. Another interesting fact is that the developers included localized versions in the game from day one of the EA, using the localizor.com crowdsourcing platform. The community translations were then proofread by us or rewritten from scratch if the quality wasn’t good enough.

The crowd translations were hit-and-miss: some languages required only proofreading, while others had to be fully retranslated. I worked with Russian myself, and I never saw a localization job so wildly uneven in terms of quality and consistency: one string is mostly correct, the next one is impressively creative, the next one is mistranslated, and the next one is a chaotic heap of Russian words. And so it went — says Anna Kiseleva , editor of Russian localization.

GameDiscoverCo recently published enlightening data about the game, including the sales graph since EA and the top ten countries in terms of sales. Here they are: 29% of the units sold are in the U.S., 11% in Germany, 7% in China, 6% in France, 5% in the UK, and 4% each in the Russian Federation, Canada, and Japan. Turkey and Australia each account for 3%.

Adding up these numbers, we discover that the top ten countries amount to 76% of all sales: 41% of them attributed to English-speaking countries and the remaining 35% to countries with localization. For the other five localized languages—Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, Polish, Korean, and Italian—the corresponding countries account for less than 3% each, and the rest is English only.

Let's make two estimates, an optimistic one and a super-conservative one.

1. The optimistic scenario: all the players in Germany play in German, all players in Turkey play in Turkish, and so on. So the whole 35% can be attributed to localization, and with Brazil, Spain + Latin America, Poland, South Korea, and Italy, the localized builds can very well reach 40-45% of the market!
2. The super conservative scenario: only half the players in Germany, China, France, etc. play in their native language, and everyone outside of the top ten plays in English. This scenario, however improbable it is, still gives us 17% of the total sales volume. Even this is a lot.

So, for this particular game, localization (and the developers' decision to include it from the start) can be attributed to 17%–45% of all sales. The real number is probably closer to 35%.

One. Third. Of a million copies. That's huge.

Planet Crafter is a masterpiece, and we at Riotloc are immensely proud to help international gamers enjoy it in their native languages. Congratulations!