Real Localization Results: How Chinese Gamers Made This Indie Game A Success

Defender's Quest by Level Up Labs

14 Years ago in 2012 (sorry if that made you feel old) Defender’s Quest released on Steam. It was a very different place back then; we were in the beginnings of the true establishment of Indie games. That was the year we had FTL: Faster Than Light, Hotline Miami, Fez, Journey, and Mark of the Ninja.

Defenders Quest’s release and post-release sales are important in a different way. While the game isn’t held to the same regard as some of these other releases, it was one of the first indies to truly appreciate the importance of localization.

Defender’s quest incorporated localizations from both professional vendors and volunteer translators:

• Professional: German, French, Spanish, Japanese

• Volunteer: Russian, Korean, Italian, Czech

Before diving into the sales figures, let’s lay out some context:

• Scope: Indie
• Price: $14.99 (USD)
• Genre: Tower Defence, RPG
• Developer: Level Up Labs, based in U.S.A
• Localization: 11 Total Languages as of 2025 (English, Czech, German, Japanese, Russian, Korean, EU Spanish, Italian, French, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese)
• Release Date: October 30, 2012

They kindly wrote a long post detailing their sales, providing the following summary about their pre- and post-localization sales shares:

These results do reinforce that localization helps improve sales in applicable markets, which isn’t surprising.

What’s more interesting is how it aligns with the results Mortal Glory observed with localization nearly 10 years later. Both titles saw similar explosions in market share for APAC countries when they added localization, compared with more gradual improvements in European markets. The chart above makes this clear: Localizing for APAC languages (in this case Japanese and Korean) provides massive benefits to discoverability and sales in those regions.

Additionally, in comparison with European languages, the growth seen in APAC markets is exponential when localized.

But, this isn’t the end of Defender Quest’s localization story. In 2017, they wrote a fantastic blog post detailing how they got thousands of new players. They had been on the hunt for ways to find new players, unable to identify any specific group they could focus on, until they realized: the answer was China.

Even without localization, they could see that China’s playerbase was growing, and they were eager to play indie titles:

So, despite the game having over 55,000 words, they decided to localize into Chinese. How did it go? Well, they were pretty clear:

“I have never had a localization pay for itself this quickly, not to mention this unambiguously. When you localize a game, you are betting that sales from the target region will increase more than they would have had you not done it. Usually, however, you're never quite sure how many regional sales you would have made anyways….The Chinese stats tell a completely different story.”

“Of all the revenue Defender's Quest has earned from China on Steam in its entire lifetime, 45% of it was earned last week. That's right, we basically doubled our lifetime sales from China almost immediately!”

They even break down their overall sales shares from 2016 and when they added localization in 2017:

The results truly speak for themselves. As noted in the original blog, Japan and Korea end up somewhere in the middle of sales units, strong results but in some ways more similar to European languages. The stand-out, clearly, is China.

While now in 2025 we know that China is critically important, it’s still impactful to see just how much of a difference Simplified Chinese localization can make. The Chinese Market is an opportunity you can’t afford to miss.