Video Game Localization // Should you Translate your Game?



Video game localization is a great way to increase the reach of your game. But is it worth it for all games? In this video I will go through what game localization is, what are the benefits, what are the downsides and most importantly: should you localize your game.

Mortal Glory on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1097530/Mortal_Glory/
Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/RedbeakGames

0:00 Intro
0:46 Translation vs Localization

Localization and Translation are two terms that often get mixed up so let’s also quickly look at the difference between those. Translating is turning your text from one language to another. Simple. Localization on the other hand is a much broader subject, but again in simple terms it’s about trying to make something understandable and enjoyable for another person in a different culture. This includes translation but can also include things such as changing units of measurement, switching a joke to a more understandable one or altogether removing some culturally sensitive subjects.

2:34 Localization Benefits

Localizing your game will increase the size of your potential customer pool, essentially making it more likely that your game will sell well. If we look at Steam survey data on languages, we can see that only 39% of Steam users have English set as their main language. It’s an important thing to consider as Steam’s algorithm won’t even offer your game to those that don’t have one of the game’s supported languages included in their own Steam languages. By supporting additional languages, you are increasing the potential visibility of your game on Steam.

The second benefit of localization is that it will increase the player satisfaction as many players will now be able to play the game with a language they are most comfortable using.

4:11 Localization Downsides

So why wouldn’t you want to localize your game? Well simply, because it takes time and money. Also from the technical point of view, if your game is almost ready and you’re thinking about localizing it, it can be a real pain in the backside to get your game to support localization. It is not something you can just quickly paste to your game, your game needs to be built to support localization.

That said, it’s not really that hard to have your game support localization. It just takes time. In my case I released Mortal Glory without localization or any support for localization. After a successful launch, I decided I wanted to localize the game and started working on that. So it’s definitely possible to modify your game to support localization, even after your game is already finished. Like said, it just takes time.

Okay. So that’s time as one of the downsides. What about the other? Localization takes money and can get very expensive depending on your game. How expensive? The prices can vary a lot based on the language-pair of the translation, how complicated your text is, who you order the translation from and most importantly how many words your text has.

You can use this site called ProZ to check what the average rates per word are for translators. On average it’s somewhere around 10 cents per word for most languages. But you can get translations for a lot cheaper too (for example from Fiverr). Although, when you try to seek good deals, there’s always a higher likelihood of getting someone who will just put your stuff into google translate and expect to get paid for it. So I would advise caution when choosing the translator and not always just going for the cheapest option.

8:44 Should you Localize your Game

It’s still hard to give a definite answer. But, if you expect your game to sell well even without localization, the answer is most likely “yes”. If you are not sure if your game will sell at all, the answer is “maybe” or “it depends”.

You will need to consider how many words your game has and how easy your game would be to localize. How much money and time would it take to localize your game? How much would your expected sales have to increase to make up for the cost?

Do you have a platformer with 500 words in total? That’s an easy “yes” to localization. But if your game is a niche story-based game with hundreds of thousands of words, it might not be worthwhile to localize it. But generally for your average indie game, I would say that if you intend to make money with it, it’s probably worth localizing.

10:34 Benefit from Localization on Steam

An additional benefit of localization is that it will increase the chance of your game going viral on Steam. How, you are probably wondering. I’ll let you in on the secret. The new and trending tab on the front page of Steam is region-specific. Meaning that the games on that list are different based on which country you are looking at the list from.

Localizing your game before release is essentially giving you more chances to win the popularity contest on Steam. And this contest comes with very real cash prizes so it’s worth participating.

Source

Categories N4G

11 thoughts on “Video Game Localization // Should you Translate your Game?”

  1. Good video. Definitely do video about localization process in practice.
    Also, do you consider China "a must-have" region to make your game "successful"? I don't really like their approval policy and the country as a whole…

    Reply
  2. Thinking ahead about localization is definitely a good idea, even if you have few words. My game has few words but I am making sure to separate labels from the values and other little things that will make translations a lot easier. Where I have hardcoded string in code I am putting a //TODO: Localize for later.

    Reply
  3. Another great vid mate. You're gonna go far on YT if you keep at it! nearly 1K.
    You said in an earlier vid that your game did well in China. Did you localise to Mandarin? Or will that be a future project?

    Reply
  4. Hello Auro, thanks for your videos, I've been watching since you started. Why do you opt for manual translation rather than ML-based, like Google Translate? Their pricing is quite reasonable, and free for small monthly amounts https://cloud.google.com/translate/pricing. And I believe ML translation at this point competes with the quality of human translation. If nothing else it seems worthwhile to fill out languages that you cannot afford to manually translate.

    Reply

Leave a Comment