How Much Does It Cost to Localize a Game?

Game localization costs between roughly $0.10 and $0.18 per word, per language, at agency rates — which means word count, not language count, is what actually decides your bill. A 2,000-word casual game into five languages runs about $1,000–$1,800. A 100,000-word RPG into the same five languages runs $50,000–$90,000. Below are the numbers by game type, the costs nobody quotes you up front, and what the routes actually look like for a solo developer.

Why word count decides everything

App localization estimates usually assume a few hundred UI strings. Games break that assumption badly: the same genre label covers projects two orders of magnitude apart. Before you price anything, export your strings and count the words.

Those are agency rates at $0.10–$0.18 per word. They are the reason most indie games ship English-only, and the reason the AI route below exists at all.

EFIGS, and why it is the default first step

The industry shorthand for a first localization pass is EFIGS — English, French, Italian, German, Spanish. It is a Western-Europe-shaped habit rather than a law, and for a mobile game it is often the wrong five. Check your own analytics first: if a third of your installs come from Brazil, Portuguese outranks Italian, and Japanese, Korean, and Simplified Chinese are frequently the highest-revenue additions for mobile. The full App Store language list covers what the stores actually support.

The costs nobody puts in the quote

• Linguistic QA. Translated strings look fine in a spreadsheet and break in-engine: text overflows buttons, gets clipped in dialogue boxes, or wraps mid-word. LQA is a separate line item, usually billed hourly, and it is where "we already translated it" projects quietly stall.
• Character limits. German runs roughly 30% longer than English; Japanese is far shorter but needs different line-break rules. If your UI was built to fit English, some of the localization budget is really a UI budget.
• Variables and gendered grammar. %s wins! is fine in English and wrong in any language where the verb agrees with the subject's gender. Games hit this constantly with player names and item names.
• Voice-over. If your game has recorded dialogue, audio dwarfs the text line entirely — studio time, direction, and talent per language. Most indie games should ship subtitles first and decide about VO later.
• Updates. A live game adds strings every season. Agencies re-quote each batch; subscriptions keep billing whether you shipped content that month or not.

The four routes, priced

Translation agencies and game localization studios

Specialist game studios charge at the upper end of the $0.10–$0.18 range and are worth it for narrative work — a good game translator is adapting jokes, item names, and tone, not converting sentences. They are the right call for a story-driven title where the writing is the product. For a puzzle game's 40 UI strings, the coordination overhead alone costs more than the words.

TMS subscriptions

Lokalise, Crowdin, and Phrase run $450–$1,045+ per month past their hobby tiers, and resell machine translation at a markup on top. You are renting workflow tooling — branching, approval chains, translator seats — built for a team with a localization manager. If your studio is one to three people, you are paying year-round for coordination features you do not use. The Lokalise alternatives guide breaks the tiers down.

Free machine translation

Google Translate scripts cost nothing and produce output that reads as machine-translated to any native speaker — no context, no glossary, and placeholders regularly mangled. For games this lands worse than for utility apps, because tone carries more of the experience. Reviews in your new markets will tell you about it.

One-time AI credits with a review pass

Localize Your App charges per string translated, once, with no subscription. One credit covers one string of up to 500 characters into one language.

• A 2,000-word casual game — call it 400 strings — into all 39 store languages fits inside the $9 Starter pack. The same job at agency rates is roughly $7,800–$14,000.
• A mid-core game around 2,000 strings into every language fits the $25 pack.
• Seasonal updates cost only the diff. Translation memory refills every string it has already seen at no charge, so a content drop adding 50 strings costs 50 strings' worth per language.

Placeholders are locked so %s, {playerName}, and rich-text tags cannot be translated or dropped, and every string is editable side by side before you export. Where AI translation genuinely holds up and where it does not is covered honestly in is AI translation good enough.

Will your engine's files work?

Worth checking before you budget anything, because export format decides how much manual work sits around the translation itself.

• Native iOS, native Android, and Flutter games use .strings, .xcstrings, strings.xml, and .arb — all supported directly, along with .xliff and i18n .json.
• Unity and Godot export CSV or engine-native resource files by default. Convert to JSON first, or point your pipeline at a JSON export if it offers one.

What a sensible indie budget looks like

1. Count your words. Everything above depends on this number and most developers guess it high.
2. Pick languages from your analytics, not from EFIGS habit.
3. Localize the store listing first. It is a few hundred words and it is the discovery lever — players search the store in their own language. See localizing your store listing.
4. Translate UI and systems text with AI, then review. Menus, settings, and item descriptions are high-volume and low-risk.
5. Spend the money you saved on a human pass over the writing that carries tone — story beats, character dialogue, marketing copy — and on LQA in your top market.

The same math for non-game apps, with the full agency-versus-platform comparison, is in the app localization cost guide.

Frequently asked questions

How much does it cost to localize an indie game?

For a typical indie mobile game of 2,000–8,000 words, expect $1,000–$7,200 for five languages at agency rates, or single-digit-to-low-double-digit dollars using one-time AI credits with your own review pass. Word count drives the number far more than the number of languages does.

Is game localization worth it for a small game?

It depends almost entirely on where your installs already come from. If your analytics show meaningful traffic from a non-English market, localizing the store listing alone is close to free and usually pays back first. Localizing the game itself makes sense once a market is already showing organic interest.

How long does game localization take?

Agency turnaround is typically one to three weeks per batch, plus LQA. AI translation is minutes, and the schedule becomes however long your review pass takes — which for a few thousand strings is an afternoon, not a sprint.