Living in the global age, we are facing and communicating in various languages in our daily lives. If a certain mobile app or website from overseas provides a localized service, it will let you access and understand it easily and feel no difficulties in managing the contents.
Same goes for games: providing proper localization for the target country reflects the country’s proper culture. Language localization will bring users more pleasant on the game and will have a more friendly approach.
We, Latis Global, who provide Game localization and game operating services for developers who launch overseas, will introduce you to more details about game localization.
1] What is localization? (Localization = L10n)
Not just simply translating the language in the game, localization provides language, UI, design, and payment service based on cultural consideration.
For example, if a service is provided all over the world only in English, there may be words that cannot be understood due to cultural characteristics in other countries, and if users who use the game reflect that the developer’s interest in other countries is low, the access level will decrease. Because it is lowered, the probability that users will play the game is lowered significantly. Localization service solves this.
2] Why localization is important?
Basically, casual puzzle games will not have a big language barrier during gameplay, but games which have story or mission that has no localization will make lots of users leave the game soon.
If the text is well-localized in each country, users will understand the contents easily and it will make the game contents more accessible.
For example, in the Uncharted series, which was also released into a movie recently, the developers decided to localize in the early stage of development rather than after an English version is developed. There were some translation issues, but now for each new series release, the localization got better and now it is loved by many gamers around the world due to its superior localization.
3] Localization that affects culture
- Religious: changing of language content, audio, visual that criticize certain religion
- Sexuality: modify the content for prohibit sexualization or expression of sexual minorities (thru removing visual element)
- Violence: prohibition of brutality, war (texture modification, camera rotation modification, script modification)
- Humor: Modify the humor that is hard to understand for other countries
- History: Content that distorts history or conflict between countries
Below are the advantages of localization
1. Effective way to increase the gross.
In the global age, targeting the various countries and localizing will have a high return of investment.
Do you realize that English games are only 27% of the total game market? The Asia region is the largest market for gamers, localizing into Chinese, Korean, and Japanese will increase the sales tremendously.
Also, you can target the European market by localizing into French, Italian, and Spanish which have 90 million gamers. To expand your game market and increase the sales, checking and knowing which region and language you need to localize into will be the most important thing.
2. High Customer satisfaction will make loyal gamers.
Providing localization service on each country will make users to accept the content fluently and be familiarized that will guarantee high satisfaction. The easiest way to give users a good game experience is to provide a high-quality game story. If users could not understand the story of the game and the game does not respect their cultural concerns, it is obvious that users will leave the game.
These days, developers provide gamers with their own selection and chance to make their own narrative. UX is an important function during game development and offers gamers the ability to play with their own story through localization. The more languages it covers, the more users will enjoy the games depending on their culture and language.
3. Local service that doesn’t require hack/mods
If we provide service with certain country’s characteristic, we will have less ROM hacking piracy and prevention of providing a poor-quality service. Localization in global age is necessary.
Final…
Game localization requires a delicate and time-consuming process. It requires several developers to be involved in. If the localization is not properly done, you might miss the launching date and you will loss the potential profit by delaying the launch.
It is not a 1-day work, but it is guaranteed that it is worthy of spending time and effort. Gaming is a fast-changing industry. Game localization requires professional translator and professional localization team. These localization team will perfectly apply appropriate languages to your game environment.
