Video games sell three times more if they are available entirely in Spanish

Report on the Economy of Spanish in the Video Game Industry

These are data from the report 'Economy of Spanish in the video game industry', from the Nebrija Spanish Observatory, directed by Professor Carlos González Tardón and made public this Thursday.

In it, a total of 559 video games were analyzed – 386 developed in Spain and 173 in Latin America – released in 2015, 2016, 2020, 2021, and 2022 on Steam, the only store that allows estimates of units sold and billing.

According to this study, the sale of games that are available entirely in Spanish increases by an average of 1,236 units, almost triple that of those that do not include this language, while that of those that are partially in Spanish increases by 434 units.

These increases occur in both free and paid games and are even more notable in adventure games because, as the study notes, they usually have a greater and more relevant narrative component than action games, which tend to be more dynamic.

Impact on Genres and Markets

Many of the products with the highest sales volume in the Spanish-speaking market are Spanish, although three of the top five are Latin American.

The games analyzed are available in an average of 6.04 languages. Of them, almost 100% have all the features in English (interface, voices, and subtitles). The writer Sandra Silvina Lorenzano, born in Buenos Aires (Argentina) in 1960 and exiled in Mexico, was the winner of the fifteenth Málaga Essay Prize with her work 'Fecund wound', in which he addresses exile and migration, according to the jury's ruling announced this Monday.

A total of 39 originals applied for this edition of the award, endowed with 6,000 euros and organized by the City Council of the Spanish city of Malaga (south) in collaboration with the publishing house Páginas de Espuma, which will publish the winning work.

In a message released after the reading of the ruling, Lorenzano was "very excited" to receive this award "which over the years has built bridges between Spain and Latin America."

She added that many of the names that received it in previous years, such as the Mexican Ignacio Padilla, the Argentine Blas Matamoro, or the Spanish Nuria Barrios, are part of her "history as a reader."

"We are all inhabitants of the homeland of the eñe, and the embrace of this shared language is the abode that allows us to sustain spaces of hope," said Lorenzano, who believes that the literary word "is more necessary than ever."

Recognition of Sandra Silvina Lorenzano

The jury, which awarded the prize unanimously, highlighted that, in this text, the author "returns to the theme of exile and migration, one of the constituent problems of the modern condition, through a style of fractures, allusions and evocations ".

Furthermore, Lorenzano highlights an approach to the genre of the essay "in which the what and the how dialogue in a fertile conversation with the own ways of telling what, being personal, ends up presenting you as collective in the case of exiles and migrants."

The director of Páginas de Espuma, Juan Casamayor, highlighted that the presence on the jury of figures such as Javier Gomá, Estrella de Diego or Espido Freire "underlines the quality of the award."

For Casamayor, "it is good" that, with Lorenzano winning it, this year the award "travels", which "has always had an international vocation", and which for the fourth time falls "on the other side", after being awarded to Ignacio Padilla, Blas Matamoro and the Peruvian Fernando Iwasaki.

According to the editor, Lorenzano "suffered exile at the age of 16, in the Videla dictatorship, and returned to Mexico," and in his work, there are "symbolic, imaginary and geographical shores" and "a permanent state of foreignness in the world."

He estimated that the winner "is a recognized poet in Spain, has a deep career as an essayist in Mexico, and is also a novelist," in addition to being a professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).

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The winning work "commits to a hybrid, mixed and open essay concept, in which the argumentative line goes hand in hand with the space and the poetic and literary vocation of the author," according to Casamayor.

The editor announced that the work will be published in Spain on March 13 and will also have editions in Argentina and Mexico, with which this award "takes another step in its visibility." EFEs), followed by Spanish from Spain (with 70% of the interface in this language, 29% of the voices and 76% of the subtitles) and Spanish from Latin America (25% of the interface, 12% of the voices and 30% of the subtitles).