For our first project we released our game with in-game English-only text but with descriptions localized in several languages. We did this because we thought having
some localized text in the description was better than having none-at-all. This spawned at least one discussion thread (
this one), and I think the general conclusion from the discussion was while it's cool to try and supply multiple descriptions (and, in an ideal world, it would be something appreciated), from a practical standpoint it creates a problem with the review process where languages which have fewer possible reviewers can be a bottleneck and actually
prevent a perfectly valid title from passing the peer review due to the title just timing out.
I'm aware that there exists a thread for
enlisting multi-language review support, but I'm wondering if there's any languages which are so under-represented in the XNA community that (for now at least) it would be a good idea to just leave them out of a final game? I don't mean this to be any sort of a language-bashing-thread, I'm really just talking practicalities here- if there's a language that has really spotty support it would be a good idea to let future creators know to avoid it.
This then leads me to what is my
real question- Let's say a creator already has a game which has been released with multi-language descriptions and/or in-game localization, is it bad to
remove those multi-language descriptions in future updates to the game to prevent them from timing out? If you do, what happens from a gamer/customer standpoint for someone who bought the game under one of the previously supported languages?
(Disclaimer time: I'm asking this question because I'm in this situation right now. Our first game's update timed out in peer review and it seems that the multi-language descriptions are to blame. We do have non-english customers who purchased this game, and may get more in the future, and I don't want to break what is an otherwise working game for them simply because we have updates/fixes we want to push for it.)