My mother language is German and to me German game translations are also EXTREMELY cheesy, corny, uncool and cringe-worthy. That's why I play all games in English and watch shows in English too if possible.
But it's true that even though in German / Austrian schools the children learn English very, very early nowadays, German speakers tend to be very uncomfortable speaking English. One reason surely is, how you said, because almost every game, show etc. gets translated AND dubbed. So you won't really learn English anywhere if you don't look for it. That's why most Germans are really bad at English. Even if you only know the bare minimum you can still graduate from school. So no real reason for them to even learn it properly. They don't WANT to speak English. If some advertisement is in English because it's "cool" they just complain because we're in a German speaking country so it *has* to be German. I know of some people here at about 30 years old or even younger that can speak English barely good enough to speak very simple sentences. And they refuse to pronounce the "th" sound or the "r" properly.
If you're living in a country where it's unusual that everything gets translated into your language, you would still play FFXIV in English because you'd have no other choice and because it would be normal. In Germany, people are extremely upset if the text of a game is translated but it isn't dubbed in German, so that some of them wouldn't even play it. They'd rather take a cheesy, cringe-worthy version of the game than play it in English. So Square Enix would lose like 80% of their German speaking playerbase if the game wouldn't be in German. I truly believe it is even worse in France because I've met so many French players that can't understand a single English word. Most Germans at least understand very simple English.
Maybe it's similar in other countries that even though people learn English in school, they can't really use it because either English class is so bad or they don't use English in their daily lives at all a well. But it seems like it's not bad enough that Square Enix translates it into those languages.
(Btw, why is it that when doing 24-man stuff in this game and you have at least one German player and something goes wrong, they start spamming the alliance and party chat in German even though no one might understand them? xD Happened sooo many times.)



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