A first look at the benefits of localization back in October, found little evidence that there was that much to gain from adding the feature. Regardless support for Pixelated Plus (and its free sibling Pixelated) was expanded from English only to support a total of five languages with the release of version 3.0.
In the below charts percentages are shown from October (the month before the release of version 3.0) and December (the month after the release of version 3.0). All downloads and sales on the PlayBook were excluded from these stats. All languages that are not currently supported are lumped into the ‘Other’ category. First a look at downloads of the free game Pixelated in October and December.
English and Spanish are by far the most popular languages. After adding support for more languages there is a bit of an increase in the percentage of users with Spanish as their primary language, but a bit of a decrease among speakers of Dutch, while French and Portuguese are mostly flat.
The next charts show purchases of Pixelated Plus from October and December.
This chart shows an increase of percent of purchases made by users of Spanish and French. Even more interesting is that the increase seen here is larger then the size of the increase seen in the free version of Pixelated. Sales to users speaking Dutch, however, are down (similar to what was seen in the top graph).
So perhaps there are some advantages to localization. But the results are (at best) mixed. Still it is important to remember that not users have English as their preferred language.