If you have 3 languages in a game, say English, German and French. Do you upload 3 different versions of the game or do you need to have all languages in the same game? Also if you are supposed to have a single version of the game containing all the languages how do you detect what country they bought it from so it starts up in the right language?

You usually have all languages in the same.

For text strings, this is usually handled automatically, you never use literal strings in code, but a string ID.

You then have several string lists, one for every language, and the device makes sure to load the right one.

If you can get it to work with just changing all strings, that is all you have to do.

Things like numbers and currencies has to be run through a number formatter, that format it according to the region. (currency symbol before or after, using . or , as decimal divider, etc)

Sometimes though there is some minor code change needed for a particular language or region.

For that, all platforms have some API to ask what language the user wants, and you can then take any action necessary.

Do you want to sell your game to a few thousand Americans or to tens of thousands of people around the world? America has only 350 million people but the world has 7 billion. More languages = more markets = more sales.

Nah... I'm a german, I play games for more than 30 years, and 99% of all the games I played were english only. I would even say, that most of the internet is english only. You have the nativ speaking english markets (US, UK, AUS), you have countries where almost everyone can speak english, atleast the iOS users (eg india), you have countries where english is part of the school system (eg germany) and you have lot of people who knows enough english to understand the gameplay (as long as you dont have a story telling game ;-) ).

With english you will cover most of the paying market, even the strong german market. I would localize it only if it sells good in the english market first.

Nah... I'm a german, I play games for more than 30 years, and 99% of all the games I played were english only. I would even say, that most of the internet is english only.

There is a good reason for that, too. Translations are usually so abysmal that they make you want to shout. I still find myself using localized software in English nowadays because when I use it in German, I'm not getting to do what I want because either I'm getting annoyed with the many grammar errors (genitive in particular seems to be a real challenge), or, not at all rarely, I can't even understand what the hell they're trying to tell me. Sometimes I back-translate to English and do a web search for a screenshot in English to figure out what a particular checkbox or button is meant to be (also necessary to find relevant documentation sometimes. Thank you to Microsoft in particular for even translating the names of system services to unintellegible gibberish so nobody can figure out what that crap actually means).

Which leads to the second most important point with localization: If you bother localizing, then please be so kind and do translations correctly, by a professional translator (not a translator that works for $2.50 per hour, and not some friend who says he speaks a few words and will do it for free). And be sure that people are able to figure out what you're talking about.

If you can't provide that, then please don't localize. Please, just, don't. English is fine, leave it there.

(The most important point of localization being: translation is only a small subset of localization. Don't upset your customers with something that looks like what they're used to at first sight, and then doesn't work as they expect.)

You can, but if you want to do it right, it's not straight forward to do automatically. You want to prioritize hyphen on the actual word parts, but to do that, you need a german dictionary!

Second priority is splitting on syllables of a word. Even harder to automate, though you can approximate it by simply splitting after the first consonant after a vowel.

Though just splitting after a consonant (and ignoring syllables and words) will likely produce lots of "weird" splits.

Honestly I've reached the conclusion that at least for games it's usually easier to just do it manually. I'm just wondering if German people would find it weird if those words got split with a hyphen.

Automatic word wrapping is fun (not). Take for example Japanese, there isn't any sort of separator between words. Your options are either to let the program split wherever it wants (including in the middle of a word), separate the words manually, or use a dictionary with every word possible to tell where word wrap should be allowed (and this last one is not necessarily foolproof!).