Simplified Chinese Localisation for Steam Games: Scope, Cost and Testing

01

Whether to localise, and when

of Steam users set Simplified Chinese

33.7%

Largest primary language on 2024 annual data (Valve, GDC 2025)

median Chinese review share with Simplified Chinese support

7%

Against 1% without it, recent releases (China Steam Signals)

China share of players, published cases

4.6% to 64%

Genre fit explains more of the spread than localisation

Three signals say a game is worth localising: Simplified Chinese reviews already arriving on an English-only build, a wishlist skew towards China in the Steamworks regional report, and players asking for the language in reviews or discussions. If you have none of the three, localise the store page and watch; if you have all three, the question is who pays for the rest.

Timing within your own schedule: Chinese players buy around Steam events and around Spring Festival, when the monthly count of Chinese Steam users roughly doubles. A localisation that lands a week after a sale has missed the moment it was for.

02

What to put in scope

Localisation is six separate decisions, not one. Price and sequence them.

Steam supports listing interface, audio and subtitles separately per language on the store page (Steamworks localisation documentation). List exactly what you have done: a game marked as fully localised that has English tutorials will be reviewed for it. Keep terminology, screenshots and context in the handover so the translator can see how a line appears in play.

03

What it costs and who to use

Vendor price lists put Simplified Chinese translation at EUR 0.09 to 0.12 a word with linguistic QA at about EUR 34 an hour (Allcorrect); Chinese vendors quote from USD 0.06, and post-editing of machine output has been offered at USD 0.03 (r/gamedev, July 2026). One indie post-mortem put its whole localisation at about USD 6,000 and the developer was unsure he would do it again, because China was 45% of players but 27% of revenue (Gods vs Horrors).

Whatever the source, the two people you cannot skip are a native speaker who plays your genre, to review the register, and someone who can answer Chinese reviews in Chinese after launch. The full cost picture is in what publishing in China costs.

04

The register problem

Most Chinese review drops over localisation are about register, not accuracy. Hollow Knight: Silksong’s “half-classical” Chinese and Avowed’s translation were both correct and both marked down; a 2024 Stardew Valley update that silently changed a translation players already knew drew the same reaction. The pattern is that Chinese players have a settled sense of how a genre should sound in Chinese, and a translation that reads as literary, machine-flat or simply different from the fan version they grew up with is treated as a lack of sincerity (诚意).

• Have a native speaker who plays your genre read the first hour and the store page before anything else is approved.
• If a fan translation exists and is liked, read it before briefing a vendor; adopt it, hire the group, or match its terminology.
• Fix the terminology first (character names, item names, mechanics) and give the translator a glossary; inconsistency is read as carelessness.
• Never change an existing translation silently. Say what changed and why, in Chinese, in the patch notes.
• Keep humour, puns and references for a human; machine output is where the “flat” complaint comes from.

05

Fonts, layout and the technical checks

Chinese text breaks layouts built for English. Characters are wider and fewer, so strings get shorter in character count and taller in line height; menus built to a fixed width clip; and a font that lacks the glyph falls back to whatever is next in the chain, which in many engines is a Japanese font with visibly different glyphs for the same character.

06

Testing before Chinese reviewers do it for you

1. 1

   Review a sample in the build, not in a spreadsheet

   Approve the store page and the first hour in play before the rest is translated. Font coverage, wrapping, menu widths and whether the tutorial makes sense without the English version beside it only show up in the build.

2. 2

   Run linguistic QA with a native speaker who plays the genre

   Vendor LQA at about EUR 34 an hour catches context errors; a genre player catches register. You need both, and the second is often a community member who will do it for a key and a credit.

3. 3

   Open a small Chinese test group

   A QQ group or a Heybox post with a handful of keys gives you Chinese feedback before launch and somewhere other than the review box for complaints afterwards. Reply in Chinese, quickly.

4. 4

   Watch the language-specific score after launch

   Once a game has 2,000 reviews overall and 200 in Chinese, Steam shows a separate Chinese score (Valve, August 2025). Read the gap against comparable titles, not against your English score; Chinese scores run lower across the board.

How to read the demand signals and the review gap in detail is in how to measure Chinese demand for your game.

07

Simplified or Traditional, and the rest of the region

Simplified Chinese is the written form in mainland China and the one Valve’s language survey measures. Traditional Chinese is used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau, differs in vocabulary as well as characters, and is a separate localisation that a Simplified translation converted by script will not pass. Do Simplified first unless your demand signals say otherwise; add Traditional when the Taiwanese or Hong Kong reviews ask for it. The localisation oversight page describes how we scope a publisher-funded localisation into a contract and check the result.