Recent reports about the addition of Ukrainian localization to a game have appeared. For example, in Red Dead Redemption 2 and Warframe, the use of the Ukrainian language has left a lot of room for improvement. This is illustrated by the Gamesensor resource's research findings.
The authors collected data on the number of paid games that were released on Steam over the previous nine years, and determined the percentage of games with Ukrainian localization.
Although there are many small local projects on Steam that can only afford to pay multilingualism, it was decided to separately examine the presence of the Ukrainian language in the so-called popular paid games. This was considered projects with an indicator of at least 10 thousand copies sold.
According to the analysis, the percentage of paid games from Ukraine localization, which has increased by more than ten thousand times, was steadily increasing by 2018. However, after 2019, this percentage began to decrease. In 2022, this figure increased, but did not reach its peak in 2018. At the same time, the number of games with the Ukrainian language on Steam is steadily increasing.
Many developers are promising to include Ukrainian localization into their future projects, but there is still a lot of work to be done in this area. Anyone who is uninterested may join the team.
Developers must inform them that the percentage of Ukrainian-speaking users on Steam is important, and that a large number of users want to play in their own Ukrainian language. Therefore, the larger the percentage of Ukrainian-speaking community on Steam, the greater the amount of attention and interest it will attract.
According to Steam statistics, 0.5 percent of users used the Ukrainian language in February 2023. This is 0.02 percent higher than in the previous study, but still too little.
Gamesensor expects that the percentage of Steam users who are Ukrainian will increase to 1% by 2023. Players must switch to Ukrainian interfaces and play and comment on Steam in Ukrainian.
So, we encourage the ITC.UA community to join this movement and to assist Steam users in increasing their Ukrainian language usage.
