DEC. 15, 2010 • DFC Intelligence has tended to focus on looking at markets by country and platform. This is obviously an important way to segment the market. However, as games are increasingly distributed online it becomes possible to reach a global audience without the traditional costs of physically entering a specific market. Therefore, it becomes important to measure the international market potential, even when a specific country or region is the primary target.
One important distinguishing feature of products is language. Lack of localization in to a specific language can keep a product out of certain markets. On the other side of the coin, games in certain languages can appeal to consumers far outside the core market. This is the case with English-language games. Overall the U.S. of course remains the largest single market for games in English. However, the U.S. only accounts for about 62% of total English-language PC games. The U.K., Canada and Australia have smaller populations, but they spend a similar amount per capita on games. Then there are many Northern European countries that have a very high population of English speakers.
In October, DFC Intelligence published its first report targeted specifically at English-language games, The Market for English Language Client-Based Free-to-Play PC Games. This report only looked at one very specific segment of the PC game market (F2P) games. However, this report is presented a new way in which we are trying to segment the market by looking at not just performance by country or region, but also language.
Going forward we will be presenting more forecasts that are segmented out by product language. To see where we are going, in this issue we wanted to present our forecasts for PC games in the English-language.
