Chromanin: French is a smaller language with about 74 million native speakers, which really isn't that much of a difference with dutch's 21 million considering in the grand scheme of things.
jamyskis: No, it's only like three times the number of potential customers, the largest body of which is used to watching and playing stuff in French. It's not like Belgium or the Netherlands where films, TV series and games are universally in English anyway.
I can tell you from my own professional experience that if France were suddenly to drop out as a video game market, it would hurt a publisher a hell of a lot more than it would if the Netherlands did.
Chromanin: French as a language used to be important centuries ago, and this historical relevance makes it seem more important than it really is, but this is not a world language by any stretch of the imagination.
jamyskis: Your quoted statistics imply that GOG should also be supporting Mandarin, Spanish and Hindi. Problem is, it's not about the sheer number of speakers - it's about their commercial relevance. The reason Spanish isn't a big thing, for example, is that PC gaming is not a big thing in Spanish countries. Same with Mandarin - there's very little point in localising in Mandarin because the market for actual full games (as opposed to F2P MMOs) is very small there.
By contrast, French-speaking users have a much larger share of disposable income. Let's compare it to Russian, whose speakers the PC market seems very eager to please right now. Russian has four times as many native speakers as French, yet Russians also have just a fraction of a French user's disposable income.
Now I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt here - I personally was tempted not even bothering to respond to your little far-right anti-Walloon rant up there (oh yes, I think you grossly underestimated people's knowledge of Belgian politics here). If it pisses you off to see French when you open GOG, imagine how pissed off many Walloons would feel (or felt) to see English when they opened the website.
You skipped reading the top of my post. As I specifically said French should definitely be included as a supported language but pretty much any international website.
I'm just correcting some numbers posted by Potzato.
