Issue: italian language

[Irarock]

Paradox has done a lot of games...no one with the italian traduction. What's the problem with the italians? Bad experience of the dev in Italy?? This behaviour, according to me, is a shame.
Hire me for life, just 2500€/month, and i'll translate all your games! You can afford it and It's an affair.

 

[SolSara]

Hearts of Iron: IV, percentage owners by country:
USA: 29.79%
Germany: 9.05%
UK: 8.66%
Russia: 4.85%
Canada: 4.37%
China: 4.37% Unsupported Language #1
Sweden: 4.29% Unsupported Language #2
France: 3.65%
Australia: 3.18%
Poland: 2.86%
Denmark: 2.46% Unsupported Language #3
Norway: 2.38% Unsupported Language #4
Japan: 2.07% Unsupported Language #5
Netherlands: 1.83% Unsupported Language #6
Finland: 1.35% Unsupported Language #7
Belgium: 1.03% (additional ppl for #6)
Spain: 0.95%
Korea: 0.87% Unsupported Language #8
Turkey: 0.79% Unsupported Language #9
Austria: 0.71%
Switzerland: 0.69% (additional ppl for #14)
Ireland: 0.64%
New Zealand: 0.64%
Thailand: 0.56% Unsupported Language #10
Ukraine: 0.48% Unsupported Language #11
Brazil: 0.48% Why did you add Portuguese, PDX?
Czech Rep.: 0.40% Unsupported Language #12
Romania: 0.40% Unsupported Language #13
Italy: 0.32% Unsupported Language #14
Estonia: 0.32 Unsupported Language #15
Others: 5.64 Unsupported Language #0.5 (Esperanto)

Let this be a cadre of reference for the future, Turkish is ninth in the line. Ironically it appears the lower the amount of players, the more vocal people seem to get to have their language added (I've never seen Swedish or Danes ask for their respective localisation).

For the PDX staff all I'd say is: Perhaps you could better localize Swedish and Chinese instead of Polish and Portuguese

Before we started translating HoI4 and Stellaris into the various languages, the sales team at Paradox Interactive did a very extensive survey of how much our games sold in various languages. We discussed this survey and realized that our older games sold best in those countries neusaap listed and thus decided on localizing Stellaris and HoI4 into German, French, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Polish, and Spanish. Turkey we had very little data from so for those two games we decided not to translate them into Turkish. This survey is something we will keep doing. In the future we might get data that says it would be profitable to localize new games into Turkish.

What I wrote about Turkish is also true for Italian. I understand that it would be nice to be able to play our games in your own language but we need to think about the profitability and our numbers showed that translating our games into Italian wouldn't be profitable. Hopefully this changes, we'll do our research before choosing which languages to localize our new games into and if it shows that it is a good idea to translate them into Italian, we might do that.

 

[Irarock]

Thank you for the answer.
In your survey before the translating did you take into account that maybe lots of people don't buy the games because of the language? how many japanese know english? chinese? koreans? turkish? thai, ukrainian, brazilian, romanian, italians ?
And i didn't know that translating a game is such a big and expensive effort... hoi4: kickstart sold 40€ on steam. I imagine that at least 2000 italians bought it = 80000€ (not all to dev true, but for sure more than 2000 ita bought it). With 80k € you are not able to do a traduction?
In the end your percentage has no sense without a total of the copies sold. Did you sell 2 milion copies? (it's an example) 6400 copies = 0,32%. 6400 * 40 = 256000€
With 256000 € italians would deserve it for example
Anyway, it seems that you won't change idea so easily. that's why i'm buying it when hoi will be on sale on steam at 10€ or less.

 

[AndrewT]

As you can see in that list, Italian is 14th in the list of unsupported languages. If any were going to be added, the Asian languages Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Thai would come before Italian (or Turkish).

Your arguments apply equally to those 13 languages; but we can't add 14 more languages to every game, it would be unsupportable. Every time a patch or DLC comes out we'd have to find 21 translators for all the new text. The initial cost is one thing, but the ongoing costs are higher.

And, what's the reward? As with everywhere else in western Europe I go to, pretty much everyone under 40 in Italy seems to speak at least some English. I suspect that Sales judged the extra sales volume to non-English speaking Italians (or Turks or ...) would not justify the investment and effort.

 

[SolSara]

Thank you for the answer.
In your survey before the translating did you take into account that maybe lots of people don't buy the games because of the language? how many japanese know english? chinese? koreans? turkish? thai, ukrainian, brazilian, romanian, italians ?
And i didn't know that translating a game is such a big and expensive effort... hoi4: kickstart sold 40€ on steam. I imagine that at least 2000 italians bought it = 80000€ (not all to dev true, but for sure more than 2000 ita bought it). With 80k € you are not able to do a traduction?
In the end your percentage has no sense without a total of the copies sold. Did you sell 2 milion copies? (it's an example) 6400 copies = 0,32%. 6400 * 40 = 256000€
With 256000 € italians would deserve it for example
Anyway, it seems that you won't change idea so easily. that's why i'm buying it when hoi will be on sale on steam at 10€ or less.

As you can see in that list, Italian is 14th in the list of unsupported languages. If any were going to be added, the Asian languages Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Thai would come before Italian (or Turkish).

Your arguments apply equally to those 13 languages; but we can't add 14 more languages to every game, it would be unsupportable. Every time a patch or DLC comes out we'd have to find 21 translators for all the new text. The initial cost is one thing, but the ongoing costs are higher.

And, what's the reward? As with everywhere else in western Europe I go to, pretty much everyone under 40 in Italy seems to speak at least some English. I suspect that Sales judged the extra sales volume to non-English speaking Italians (or Turks or ...) would not justify the investment and effort.

What AndrewT wrote is the truth. Also, we look at game statistics as well if possible - how many are playing other games similar to our own, what languages they have been localized into and how many plays in other languages than English - and use those numbers to try and estimate how many people will buy our games just because we translate the games into their language. We have had partners translating some of our games into Polish and Russian before and they have sold pretty well, so for HoI4 and Stellaris we decided to add those languages. Brazilian Portuguese was also added as the Sales team's survey showed that it should be profitable.

For every DLC we add between 10,000 to 50,000 new words and for example EU4 is now close to 700,000 words if you count all the DLCs. To translate EU4 into only three languages still costs more than 200 000 Euro if we start from the beginning. As AndrewT wrote, for each language we add the cost will increase, the administration around it will take longer time (I am responsible for the localization of all projects at PDS, so I know the process inside and out), the Engine team gets more work to do and it eats into the budget of the game and the DLCs. Localizing into different languages is a great thing, it makes the games available for more people and I wish it was easier, less costly and that we could do it for more languages.