How to localize games for Japan and South Korea
Developer of June’s Journey provides 3 key approaches to localization
This article has been authored in collaboration with Lisa Pak, strategic partnership manager at Wooga
June’s Journey is a visually stunning hidden object game set in the 1920s that follows amateur detective June Parker as she solves mysteries around the world. Released by Wooga in October 2017, June’s Journey has seen steady growth since launch thanks to its vivid artwork, rich story and worldwide locations to explore. This depth of experience is central to Wooga’s philosophy, as expressed by Lisa Pak, Strategic Partnerships Manager — “at the heart of every game we make is a gripping narrative, with relatable characters that take our players on an adventure.”
One area that needs special attention with a game that has such a focus on story and theme is localization — specifically the need to ensure that localized content captures the true spirit of the game and narrative details. This is particularly true for hidden object games, since players need to find specific classes of objects among the many items in the picture — possibly including decoys or intentionally challenging distinctions. In this context, the slightest mistranslation could render a level or even an entire game unplayable. This article explores how Wooga approached three key aspects of localization that are important for any developer seeking success in a foreign market: content localization, customer support and user acquisition.
Why Japan and South Korea and how to succeed there
The localization of June’s Journey began following a cost/benefit analysis that gave Wooga the data they needed to justify placing their focus on Japan and South Korea. Compared to other markets, these regions had a high potential for growth and impressive engagement among local users as well as a thriving mobile culture.
1. Content localization
When approaching the localization of the Play Store listing and game content itself, an important distinction was drawn between translation and transcreation. Learning from their experience with a previous title, ‘Pearl’s Peril’, rather than directly translating each word or even each sentence they adapted the message into a new language while maintaining the style and tone that was so important to the game’s initial success. This holistic approach that focused more on the overall impression ensures players won’t be put off by errors such as clunky grammar or a lack of informal language — for a game that puts such heavy emphasis on the story, this was particularly important.
An example from June’s Journey involves transcreated Japanese text that literally means “I feel my chest pocket warm” — this would make no sense in English, but is a local idiomatic phrase that simply means “I have lots of money!”
One often overlooked aspect of this process is the impact font choice can have as not all fonts include all the necessary characters for foreign languages. Seeing a character in your native language failing to display properly or displaying outside the text box is an alienating experience for the player as it needlessly gives the impression that the game is not designed for them and little effort has been made to cater for their time. As part of their successful push into new markets, Wooga took care to adjust fonts and formatting based on extensive testing in all the materials for June’s Journey, ensuring it was a pleasure to read in all languages.
2. Customer support
If someone in a foreign market encounters a problem with the game, your best case scenario is that they contact your customer support rather than simply immediately churning. This is a common pain point for many games as users will often churn if they feel the support service is not able to help them. To avoid this danger, Wooga established local support teams that could guarantee native-language support within 24 hours. Wooga also ensured their players had localized FAQs — allowing players in many cases to solve the problem themselves with expert, transcreated guidance and reducing the load on the live support desk.
As Lisa Pak, Strategic Partnerships Manager puts it, this approach to native customer support was taken “to ensure a more authentic, natural and appealing tone.” This philosophy is reflective of the wider game: the user journey began with a transcreated store page with transcreated replies to reviews and proceeded through a fully transcreated game, so it makes sense for customer support to be handled the same way!
3. User Acquisition
Running campaigns to acquire users in foreign markets can be intimidating given the potential for a mis-step to actually damage your title’s reputation in that region. The reality is that with the right approach it can be fairly easy, which is what Wooga found in relation to June’s Journey. Having already ensured that the game and community were region-friendly, Wooga did not need to fundamentally change their user acquisition strategy — they simply made their existing efforts mindful of the region.
They continued to run the same kinds of UA campaigns as before but with local insights and live adjustments as they began generating their own results, for example finding Youtube to be far more successful than in the US. Changes included targeting insights (check out Google Play’s insights into the Japanese and Korean markets), new creative assets that featured regional themes (such as Shiba Inus for Japan) and copy that used the style and phrasing of a natural speaker. Recent efforts from Wooga to engage with local agencies and networks within Japan and South Korea are examples of more developed approaches, but were far from essential to break into the market.
Impact and conclusion
Launching into new markets can give a massive boost to a studio as it multiplies your audience for relatively little effort. The success of a region-sensitive approach such as Wooga’s is easy to show. By ensuring their localization truly created a comfortable end-to-end experience for potential players, June’s Journey saw CPI reduction of 52% in Japan and 73% in Korea. These reductions still put the CPI at or near the CPI for a US audience, however engagement and monetization had also improved alongside. In Japan Wooga saw a D7 ARPDAU around double that of the US alongside a 23% increase in D1 retention and 15% increase in D7 retention, quickly pushing Japan into their top markets. Korea’s D7 ARPDAU is now equivalent to the US, and they have also seen engagement improve with a 9% and 8% jump in D1 and D7 retention respectively.
Economy metrics aside, local appreciation of their efforts can be seen in the fact that a staggering 96% of local players use the new localized version of the game. After only a few months, Wooga have seen Japan and South Korea go from being potential markets of interest to the verge of joining their top 5 markets globally — a massive success which other studios are keen to duplicate by taking a similar approach!
What do you think?
Do you have thoughts on how to localize effectively? Let us know in the comments below or tweet using #AskPlayDev and we’ll reply from @GooglePlayDev, where we regularly share news and tips on how to be successful on Google Play.
