This seems uncharitable. The real world is more complicated than that, so things are almost never strictly superior. (Usually the answer to “why don’t people pick up this free 20-dollar-bill on the ground?” is “it doesn’t exist”.)
Specifically with regards to translations, a dev tells Steam which languages their game is available in, and then Steam displays this game only to customers who both understand these languages and have told Steam that they want to see games in those languages. (I suspect other app stores have similar policies?) So you either fully translate your game, or lose sales, or lie to a store that could kick you off for lying. In case of Understand, the dev chose to make a game with basically no in-game text, and a fully translated store page.
But most people who’ll be playing the game do speak English
This is possibly true, but not necessarily so. For instance, here is the Steam language user survey for August 2021. The direct English-speaking proportion is only 33.6%, and I don’t know what percentage of Chinese- or Russian-speaking Steam users can also speak English.
Finally, if most people on Steam spoke Chinese rather than English, I suspect you would not advocate for games to display icons + Chinese text, if translating stuff was too cumbersome.
If Steam policy is as you say, then we can certainly blame Steam for the UI being bad—we can say “Steam policies enforce bad UIs”—but in no way whatsoever does that make the UI less bad, nor does it make a hypothetical UI just like this one except with English text any less strictly superior.
I do not agree that “things are almost never strictly superior”. In my experience (and UX design and software development is what I do for a living), things are often strictly superior. People’s reasons for not doing the strictly superior thing are bad reasons much more often than they are good reasons.
This seems uncharitable. The real world is more complicated than that, so things are almost never strictly superior. (Usually the answer to “why don’t people pick up this free 20-dollar-bill on the ground?” is “it doesn’t exist”.)
Specifically with regards to translations, a dev tells Steam which languages their game is available in, and then Steam displays this game only to customers who both understand these languages and have told Steam that they want to see games in those languages. (I suspect other app stores have similar policies?) So you either fully translate your game, or lose sales, or lie to a store that could kick you off for lying. In case of Understand, the dev chose to make a game with basically no in-game text, and a fully translated store page.
This is possibly true, but not necessarily so. For instance, here is the Steam language user survey for August 2021. The direct English-speaking proportion is only 33.6%, and I don’t know what percentage of Chinese- or Russian-speaking Steam users can also speak English.
Finally, if most people on Steam spoke Chinese rather than English, I suspect you would not advocate for games to display icons + Chinese text, if translating stuff was too cumbersome.
If Steam policy is as you say, then we can certainly blame Steam for the UI being bad—we can say “Steam policies enforce bad UIs”—but in no way whatsoever does that make the UI less bad, nor does it make a hypothetical UI just like this one except with English text any less strictly superior.
I do not agree that “things are almost never strictly superior”. In my experience (and UX design and software development is what I do for a living), things are often strictly superior. People’s reasons for not doing the strictly superior thing are bad reasons much more often than they are good reasons.