It gets a little more interesting when we look at units per country. As expected most of our units have been sold in the US. The UK comes in a distant second, which makes sense given Positech is from the UK and has a bit of a following there. We’re not surprised that we quite a few sales in France, Germany, and Canada, as strategy games are usually popular in those countries.

Things start to get interesting when you notice that China is right behind Germany in terms of units sold. When we announced the launch of Political Animals we were contacted by some localizers from indienova offering a translation to Simplified Chinese. To be honest, the Chinese market was a bit of a mystery to us and it wasn’t high priority, but given our poor launch there was little to lose, especially when they offered to localize pro bono. Since Chinese players mostly won’t both bother with a game unless it’s localized or super popular, this guaranteed us a few extra sales. I even took the extra effort to start a Weibo page, though I’m not entirely sure if it really matters.

The process was pretty seamless, but took about a month to iron out the kinks. The additional sales weren’t mind boggling, but we now had numerous people in China downloading and reviewing our game, and most of them seemed happy with it. In the two weeks following our announcement of the localization our Chinese sale shot up by 300% (from a very small number) and during the winter sale Chinese sales were second only to the US. The catch is that Steam’s suggested pricing is 50% off of our regular US price, so every unit sold in China is worth half a unit when it comes to our break even point.

We have localization in the works for Russian and Polish, and we’re hoping they’ll provide a small boost to our sales as well.

Sales by Platform