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Mostly because this is generally incredibly inconvenient for users and the way Helldivers2 does it is actually super weird because no one is going to think about downloading "DLC" to get separate languages.
Its also very well known that once you start making users downloading more 'stuff' that you begin to lose user almost immediately. There's almost no upside to making this a separate download. The downsides are that you lose players. This tradeoff is generally speaking not that useful when you can just include all required files so that user can immediately change their language and play immediately.
Its also just silly for them to try to 'save' maybe 2GB of local storage for a gaem that is 71GB large. It would just be simpler to make that 2GB available at the outset. Then you're not wondering why the intro movie is in English still, then changes to French the next time you load the game.
The overhead ofr having all languages options available immediately is negligible. The overhead and player lost for players being confused or annoyed when changing languages and it not working or requiring 'more' downloads is exteremly high.
tl;dr devs stopped doing this because it isnt worth the effort, it saves almost no local resources, and absolutely causes player attrition
This is the right answer. Too bad the people who think it is *all about them* won't see the common sense in it.
I can tell you right now if you ever beat Dragon Age: Origins and watch the ending credits you will literally go through every language version the game was used in it during the sequences. It takes a country year to go through those ending credits, too.
Then again we are talking about people who will most likely never in their lifetimes do something that requires needing more than one language to express a game they made.
Personally I think making them optional is far better than them all being installed into a game despite my needs.
Most devs don't use it because they have no idea how to, or don't care.
Quick primer on Steam's content system: The smallest unit of content deliverable by Steam is called a 'depot', which can contain multiple files and folders. A game on Steam can have one depot, in which case that depot contains all the game's files. Or, it can have multiple depots. The advantage of having multiple depots is you can tag depots with certain things; for example, have one depot which is tagged Windows only, and another tagged Linux only. So if you put all your game's .exe and .dll files into a Windows only depot, Linux users won't have to download them. Depots are also used for DLC; a DLC depot is only installed if you own the DLC and that DLC is enabled, which the user can do manually, or the game can do programatically.
Ok: onto language. One thing you can tag a depot with is language. Then, Steam will only download that depot if either your Steam client language is set to that language, or if you override the language selection from the game's properties.
This has some upsides; for example, the game will always download by default configured to your default language. But, there's problems. You can't have more than one language installed. If you want to have Steam itself in one language and games in another, it's a hassle. You can't switch languages in game, etc.
So, developers tend to either just bung all the language stuff into unconditionally installed depots, or do what Helldivers 2 does and sidestep Steam's built-in language support and instead make the language packs optional DLC. That method has benefits; you can install more than one language, and the game can call an API to download DLC while in-game, so it can use that to allow in-game language choice. But it has downsides too; Steam doesn't know these DLCs are languages, so they won't integrate with any of the ways in Steam of picking languages. It's basically using one feature (optional DLC installs) as a hack to paper over the problems with Steam's built-in language support.
So, devs have a choice between three ways of doing things, all of which have benefits and drawbacks.
Valve could fix this. They could, for example, allow games to programatically install language depots like they can currently do with DLC depots. Let you specify in the Steam options that you want the client to be in one language, but games to default to being in another language. Let you choose multiple languages for a game, a primary and several secondary languages. Let you choose what languages you want to be installed at game install time. Etc. Get the best of both worlds of built-in support for languages and DLCs.
It won't solve every issue; lots of developers would no doubt continue to just jam all language files into the base game, because it's the path of least resistance. But Steam could at least stop being a part of the problem and not force ugly trade-offs onto developers. Sorry for the long post!