Steamspy => Geography would more or less give you numbers on how foreign markets are being done. I don't want to create an account there nor pay (if needed) though.
Costs for localisation are basically simple, there is the following parts to do:
- switch the font / character set to something that's capable of handling foreign characters (for example, for French: éèàùçà... and a few others like â ê ô î û). Multiple solutions can do this, like having a separate character set for each language or switching to a more memory intensive character set that handles more of them).
- change all buttons with text on it to make them text-based.
- Have the code automatically resize itself / the button depending on the size of the text itself.
- set-up an interface in the game code that reads from a source (xml file, key-based property file... whatever). So it can easily be updated.
- bonus step, if necessary, implement different systems to handle plurals. Emphasis on the plurals, with an S, as some languages have multiple plurals. Also to manage genders if encessary between tooltips (completely foreign concept to english). Which basically means that additional care must be taken for different tooltips to NOT reference each other if possible.
The translation itself is next to nothing compared to making a scalable UI. That said, as most of the game is moddable, most of the elements in the game should already be somewhat scalable. Costs are "fairly" low (maybe 2-3% of total project costs if done from the start. However... if done later, costs can rise ten-fold.
So, perhaps add a funding tier for $X that is: Localize AI Wars to a language of your choice so we can share with everyone. Perhaps give them a fancy title or badge and make them the X language Representative/advocate. They would also get to help with the localization and get a fancy credit in the credits. Maybe even offer other tiers that allow localization for previous Arcen games.
Making people pay to localize the game ? Not good publicity with a 300k budget. I'm against that idea.
