Games developers and publishers didn't want as much Chinese and Italian localisation during 2019.

That's according to LocalizeDirect – as reported by GamesIndustry.biz – which has published information about more than 14,000 orders it received last year.

German was the most commonly-requested language for 2019, taking up 10.3 per cent of the company's business by word count, followed by French (9.8 per cent), Japanese (9.7 per cent) and Russian (nine per cent).

The company reported a reduction in work for some languages, including Simplified Chinese, European Spanish and Italian. The latter was likely due to economic issues in Italy, while the drop in Chinese work is in part due to that market being hit by the government approval freeze in 2018.

Meanwhile, the company saw an increase in demand for Polish, which was 3.9 per cent of LocalizeDirect's business last year, 

The firm also reports that gamers in Japan and Korea spend more money than consumers in France, Italy, Germany and Spain. 

"Due to the large gamer populations in the East Asian and CIS regions, Japanese, Korean and Russian are becoming the focus of most developers," business development manager Dolly Dai said.

"The gaming audience in Korea (about 28.9 million gamers) and Japan (67.6 million) have a high purchasing power, perhaps due to a historically long-lasting gaming culture and willingness to explore new titles and genres. The APAC (Asia-Pacific) region accounts for almost half of global game revenue. That makes game devs and publishers look towards this part of the world"