

Was Localizing Defender's Quest Worth It? - bane
http://www.fortressofdoors.com/was-localizing-defenders-quest-worth-it/

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jblow
It looks to me like the author is trying hard to justify localization because
he wants it to be worthwhile, but looking at the numbers, I don't see the
evidence. The reasons he gives seem like rally big stretches and factual
cherry-picking.

It is nice to make your game available in many languages, but getting
translations that aren't terrible is hard, and I have never seen a clear
business case for it. So I think the proper attitude is "there is not an
obvious business case, but we are doing it because we want to."

~~~
davidp
I mostly agree. The real measure of an investment, however, is the opportunity
cost: What else could I have done with those resources? Might it have yielded
higher returns?

But as the author alludes, the company is much better positioned for "the next
one," so the investment actually has yet to pay off and there's plenty of
upside left. From that perspective it was a huge win, since it appears that he
came close to covering his costs, and now the company has a competitive
advantage.

~~~
larsiusprime
(I'm the author) Just for the record, although it's hard to exactly quantify
the extra amount earned from the localization, even a conservative estimate
covers our localization costs and a small profit. You're right in pointing out
that opportunity cost is the real cost.

If this was the only game I was ever going to make, I probably would have
spent my time better on things other than localizing it nearly a year into its
lifespan.

I think the most important point is that we left plenty of money on the table
by not having the localization available on day one. The localization was
launched very late into the game, and almost all revenue comes from the major
promotional periods.

It will be interesting to compare results with the sequel to see if we have
notably larger market share right from the start in the languages we choose to
localize in, I think that will provide a little more conclusive data than this
admittedly murky analysis.

~~~
anon4
I see there have been several fan translations. Do you think it would have
been better/cheaper/easier to have in-game support for adding translation
patches and working with the community, rather than hiring professionals?

~~~
larsiusprime
There is in-game support for adding translations, sort of. You just drop files
into a folder and there you go. (This is in fact how our Russian and Korean
translations turned up, fans had started working on them on their own, and
then started emailing their work to us).

The only thing that requires a lot of heavy lifting is if that language
requires a previously unsupported font (like a new Asian language), or if the
new language has problems fitting in the User Interface.

As I said in the article, I would not consider fan translations a
_replacement_ for professionals so much as a _supplement_ , although I guess
this depends on the needs of your app/game. In my case we had a big story-
based RPG with 45,000+ words, which is not a trivial exercise and there's all
sorts of opportunities for it to go off the rails in ways that kill the
sparkle (inconsistent grammar, poor or erroneous characterization, horrible
translations of jokes, etc). Fans can and do produce great work, but you can't
assume that's what you'll receive.

For languages you're really interested in targeting (for us our top priority
was German) you don't want to roll the dice on that. But for "like to have"
languages it's not a bad idea.

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pixelcort
Another simple benefit to localization is that it can make it easy to fix
typos or reword things in your native language, too, if you use short keys in
your code and have all real strings in a single place.

Even if you don't plan on localizing, it's a good habit to move all your
strings to one place like this, as you can quickly see in one place if all of
your strings have consistent tone, style, and word usage.

~~~
Kiro
I don't like using short keys. Another thing you need to come up with a name
for. I much rather have the English phrase as the "key".

~~~
JW_00000
But what then when you fix a typo in your English text? Or slightly rephrase
it without altering the meaning? This means the translation files have to be
updated as well.

~~~
ygra
Or you have an en → en translation file. For some things this is necessary
anyway (e.g. QTranslator's handling of plural forms).

~~~
blt
+1. en → en translation file is common practice.

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andrewljohnson
I appreciate the article and data, had a couple of thoughts from my own
experience localizing:

* Punting on localization can make a lot of sense. It helps to do localization up front and plan for it, but that's when opportunity cost is at its greatest. It's also a marginal "multiplier" effect, and so it's not a make-or-break engineering item usually.

* I doubt localization to Russian is as good as Spanish, very often.

* Definitely agree that translations from actual users are leagues ahead of professional translator services, good thought to cultivate that.

* You can do it incrementally, and localize your app description prior to the app itself, which doesn't have the same engineering requirements.

~~~
tehabe
"Definitely agree that translations from actual users are leagues ahead of
professional translator services, good thought to cultivate that."

Not really. In recent month I was very active in translating software and web
site from English to German and found a lot of weird and partially wrong
translations.

Some of those are due to the context free way translation sometimes works. You
get the original string and you have to translate it. For example "Sync", but
is that a verb or a noun? In English it might not matter but in German it
does.

Also sometimes you get people with a dialect in, which use different words and
even a different word order which might only be used by a small minority but
it is not consensus in the language.

I think the best approach would be to do both. Get professional translators
and use direct feedback from users.

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Zarel
The link to Playism is broken.

URLs in HTML are treated as relative by default, so doing <a href="playism-
games.com"> creates a link to [http://www.fortressofdoors.com/was-localizing-
defenders-ques...](http://www.fortressofdoors.com/was-localizing-defenders-
quest-worth-it/playism-games.com/)

~~~
larsiusprime
Cheers, fixing now.

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nraynaud
I still think you should not focus on localization for the release of your
first game. Try to get stuff out of the door and improve on it later. For
subsequent games, maybe your organization might able to do a bit more before a
release, but remember that trying to do more and more at once is just a recipe
for disaster.

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hayksaakian
You used geography as a metric to correlate with languages.

I would think there are some number of people in the USA that appreciate
having the option to play in their preferred language.

It'd be more interesting to find out how many people picked language X vs
buying from country Y.

~~~
larsiusprime
Indeed, for instance I bet there's a large Spanish market in the U.S.

Unfortunately, Steam doesn't really give me access to that sort of data (an
oversight I hope they fix) -- they know what language people are running Steam
in, there's no reason they couldn't pigeonhole the language of your player
base and show you that data.

~~~
hayksaakian
i guess my question was about choosing the language itself,

if it's chosen in-game, you could HTTP some basic analytics data to yourself.

~~~
larsiusprime
A solid idea! Will probably do that next time.

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th0br0
I'm wondering how many of the Russian purchases were due to "cd key stores" or
similar. Given that they're only paying half of what US customers are, the
markup's high enough. Also, more and more of these stores send you the games
as steam gifts.

~~~
larsiusprime
(I'm the author) -- Good question! These were all actual sales, not steam key
redemptions (which are tracked separately). So the answer is "zero."

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virmundi
Open question to readers: do gaming frameworks provide functionality like
this? I know that Android SDK, and Appcelerator provide hooks for
internalization (and by extension localization). Are there similar functions
in game SDKs?

~~~
TillE
Some do. Unreal Engine 4 has localization support built in:
[https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/creating-a-localization-
re...](https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/creating-a-localization-ready-game-
in-ue4-part-1-text)

And I suspect any game engine intended for text-heavy games would provide
something. Ren'Py is one example.

But I'm fairly sure that Unity doesn't.

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melvinmt
You might not have enough data yet but now I'm curious to see a study into the
localization sensitivity for various languages.

