Fascinating reads, both the of the links. This bit on the HN site:

As a data point, the Blizzard sales team’s projections were that we would sell 4,000 copies of StarCraft in a year in South Korea, so there was no reason to in localize the game.

First year sales were on the order of 100x that amount, quite the surprise for everyone at Blizzard! —Patrick Ryan, Blizzard software developer

Wowza!

Also in the HN thread, a link to Patrick Ryan’s blog. Lots of great reading there.

Edit: formatting