It appears that focusing on localization has been the right decision!
Ban-chan graciously offered to help with the translation and I was happy to collaborate. Upon completion and enabling Japanese support, sales in Japan have surged after receiving interest by two prominent sources: 2bro and AUTOMATON. The surge began when
AUTOMATON released their first article about Nevergrind Online (NGO). This triggered a sudden and dramatic surge of interest from Japan! I was astonished because it surpassed the surge in sales and players after the Early Access launch.
Prior to localization, very few units were sold in Japan. However, I knew that Japanese was one of the first languages that I wanted to support. I remembered that the Japanese seemed to love the
original Nevergrind, a free browser-based RPG, which was quite limited in comparison to NGO, but it certainly had depth and hand-crafted charm. It was interesting enough to spark a
600+ comment thread about Nevergrind on Livedoor. For this reason, NGO's success in Japan has not been a complete surprise. I am also aware that games like Wizardry are exceptionally popular. I suppose it makes perfect sense that NGO is big in Japan!
Japanese was the third language that was officially enabled on NGO's Steam store page. This triggered a series of events that resulted in a wild week where the metrics took off like a rocket! It all culminated by hitting 701 peak concurrent users! You can see that the first AUTOMATON article catalyzed a surge on July 14th.
The growth persisted for several days and I thought perhaps I would have some breathing room to focus on server optimizations. I was wrong! On July 19th, another Japanese surge happened when 2bro began his broadcast of Nevergrind Online! For those that are not aware, 2bro is one of the largest gaming youtube channels in Japan with over 3 million subscribers. In the weeks ahead, the video will probably be viewed over 200,000 times!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
This was interesting to me because I had a hunch that this might happen. I happened to see Otojya's tweet about a "super hot game" that he was excited about.
I was not sure that Nevergrind Online was making enough waves to get his attention, but it seems that it did!
And, finally,
AUTOMATON put the cherry on top with their second article about NGO! What is amazing is that they actually reached out to me via email and requested a second article along with interview questions. I have the utmost respect and admiration for the consummate professionalism of the Japanese media. They have been a joy to work with!
So here's a quick breakdown of factoids for this exciting week:
- Japan surpasses the United States in total units sold!
- All-time peak of 701 concurrent users!
- Trending #2 game on steamcharts.com!
- Streamed by 2bro to tens of thousands of viewers!
One final side note:
QTranslate is an absolutely amazing translation tool! It has made it simple to interact with my player base in Japan! You can select any text, hit CTRL+Q, and you can read anything. This works on Discord, Twitch, YouTube, and emails. This even works inside of NGO itself! Japanese players seem astonished that I can interact them with such ease, but this tool has been my secret weapon!