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[Eylos]

I see games as a piece of art and culture, so i don't think we should always think on a selling point of view, but as acess to culture, i know part of the blame is in part because the State doesn't think like that, but that is also true in the gaming comunity.

Games should be more acessible to more people, not only lucky people who studied english, that is what i'm saying.

 

[Lain]

You're taking this far too personally. They aren't going to translate if the money would bring a bigger return elsewhere. He was pointing out that older translation paradigms probably don't hold true today.

I really don't get the jab at paradox though. Even if you don't like their niche they put out some clearly high quality games.

If I take it a bit too personally, it's probably because, clicking on the link in the first post, what I read is Dev Tip: Skip translating into Italian. It's a waste. Use that budget for Russian or Portuguese-Brazilian instead.
I don't expect developers of niche games or on low budgets to offer translations for every language, mine included, if they don't think it'll prove beneficial to sales. I don't expect them to suggest (to other developers, since that's what I take a dev tip as) to not translate in specific languages as well, and since it's my language he targeted it ends feeling somewhat personal.

Yeah, Paradox games are quality, but I don't have fun with them so they are a waste of my time and money. It was a play on his tweet, but I realized I wasn't even sure he worked at Paradox (I took the connection from some post in here yet on his twitter it seemed to me he doesn't work there anymore?) so I took that out right after posting.

 

[Elios83]

I'm italian, maybe his games don't sell well here, I don't know.
But thinking that italians will buy non localized games easily and games will sell the same regardless of localization is a total lie.
I have many friends who will simply refuse to buy games like Persona or Yakuza although they're interested in them just because they're in english only.
Latest example, many people who have loved the Phoenix Wright trilogy on the DS which was fully translated in italian now won't buy the new english only, digital only 3DS games.
Localization is a very important issue here also because compared to other north-european countries the average level of english knowledge is lower.
And btw publishers are not stupid, if they continue to translate games in italian it's because the numbers are there. So this guy is basically selling his own personal experience as the full picture.

 

[John Kowalski]

I don't agree with him at all, but like the Italians say - "Que sera, sera."

Spoiler

for the uninitiated, que sera sera means "that's life"

Actually it means what will be, will be.

See, if good Italians translations were a thing you'd probably know that.

 

[Fred-87]

you have to agree that only in recent times we are getting games translated in portuguese, before we only got english games

games are usually translated to dutch and french even if portuguese is the 6th laguage that have more speakers in the world, french is in 18 dutch in 56

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers

money/social discrimination

Except if you look at steamspy you can see for a lot of games the Dutch market sold more then the Portugese markets combined. Also not sure how its discrimination. Is it also discrimination against the Uzbek people if their language is not translated?

 

[Fred-87]

Why would any developer translate a game into French, German, or Italian if they were on a budget?

Honestly it can be assumed that if you live in France, Quebec, Germany, Austria, Italy, or Switzerland you know English.

If I was a dev and had to pick and choose languages I'd pick:
English
Spanish
Mandarin
Cantonese
Brazilian Portuguese
Russian

Good your not a dev
China doesnt buy many games in comparison. Same for Brazil. Germany buys a lot of games and they hate if they cant choose their own language. I sold for a long time games to a lot of Germans and i would get so so so many cancellations when people didnt read the text enough when a game was the English version.. Italy is even worse.

 

[Moor-Angol]

games got translated into korean (where they pirated the shit out of them) , so why is it too expensive to translate them into italian?
i never saw anyone from my friends in south korea own an original psx, ps2 or wii game.
not every game but most(?) got translated. so this is what makes me wonder.

the answer is so easy : different market share

your friends are not a good representation of the market (if you don't have around 10,000 friends), in S.Korea absolutely there is much more people playing videogames than Italy.
Italy is the 3-4 market in UE regarding the population but absolutely is not in the same position regarding videogames.
So I'm not surprised to hear that from developers.

I'm italian and I barely played a translated game, always used to play in english (from the 80's with C64), but in those years I don't know how many people I heard in real life or in gaming forum saying "game X is not translated into italian? I won't buy it", so there should be a potential userbase but if they don't buy games developers think that italian market is very small so they don't invest money into localisation.
And for a small company point of view this is not something which they could be blamed for.

 

[dr3upmushroom]

i mean in a country like italy, where there are so many tourists, not learning english seems pretty rude tbqh

That's what a racist would say.

 

[orthodoxy1095]

I see games as a piece of art and culture, so i don't think we should always think on a selling point of view, but as acess to culture, i know part of the blame is in part because the State doesn't think like that, but that is also true in the gaming comunity.

Games should be more acessible to more people, not only lucky people who studied english, that is what i'm saying.

Ideally, but that accessibility in terms of language can cost devs lots and lots and lots of money.

 

[Metzhara]

i can tell you Italian dub is very high quality....just for movies and tv shows. videogames don't get any of this, except a couple of memorable dubs like Grim Fandango and Legacy of Kain

I find it hard to believe that ANY dub of Legacy of Kain is better than the original. I mean... that is easily the high bar for voice acting.
If so, that guy will be that language's Nolan North/Troy Baker.

I also wanted to add fun fact: In Italy, "Knight Rider" was called "Super Car". While spot on, it somehow lacked flair.

 

[nynt9]

I think people are not taking into context that this is Paradox. Maybe AAA games have an Italian audience, but paradox games are already niche. And they're generally more complex, PC oriented games intended at adult audiences so perhaps them not seeing a big drop when they don't localize games to Italian makes sense. They probably lose some customers but clearly their sales data shows that it's not big enough to make localization worth it. Applying logic from games like Assassin's Creed doesn't make sense here.

 

[Caronte]

It's not like Paradox puts any effort in their translations anyway, I've yet to play anything by them in Spanish because their translations are consistenly crap.

 

[Bashtee]

The European market is quite complex with all our different languages, so I can understand that some languages are simply not financially worth it.

I still remember when I saw my first movie with one person speaking every single line in I think russian, while you still could hear the original english VAs. It was mind blowing after seeing the german version of the movie, which imho was quite good.

I'm sorry you had to experience this.

I hate dubs but I'm part of an extremely small minority with that. Once you know English enough that you can understand the original VA I find it impossible to go back.

Calling BS on this one. It depends on what you consume, but there are regularly parts I can't understand because of the accent or I simply don't know specific words or can't grasp their meaning in the presented context.

So instead of working myself through a dictionary, I just consume the dubbed version. Another point is the quality. German dubs are usually very good.

Going by Games/publishers: Ubisoft usually has really good dubs, so does Blizzard, especially since MoP in WoW.

 

[Mithos]

I never play translated games.

Swedish

I've played one.... Shadowgate (NES)
Buy yeah I really can't do it either, I can't even watch Swedish movies, everything feels so "wrong".

 

[JohnTH]

Out of curiosity: why is southern Europe so much worse at English than northern Europe? Poor teachers, not enough classes in school or something else?

Spoiler

I prefer English over my native language.

Because they speak a romance language, not germanic.

Dunno. Portugal is a southern European country which speaks a romance language, and last I heard, we were supposed to be decent at English. And I don't have any reason to doubt that, either; I've seen natives speak in English in different situations and contexts, with varying degrees of fluency.

I don't know if it's because we don't dub movies. Germany does, and they're superb at English too, so I don't know, but here's a map anyway:

Blue means "sub", red means "dub".

 

[Ethical Hedonism]

hahaha this twitter thread is great

 

[spons]

Man, I remember the Infamous on PS3 drama. It was only available in the native language of the region it was sold in, meaning Dutch for all Dutch gamers. The complaints and fallout was so great they released a patch adding the English language and added stickers to the packaging informing people of the availability of said patch.

Dutch dubs are almost always garbage, done by people with zero interest in the end product. Luckily, they're also almost non-existent.

Edit: closest I could find to the sticker that was added to packaging afterwards. I wonder if they recalled everything or forced stores to do it.

 

[HariKari]

I see games as a piece of art and culture, so i don't think we should always think on a selling point of view, but as acess to culture, i know part of the blame is in part because the State doesn't think like that, but that is also true in the gaming comunity.

Games should be more acessible to more people, not only lucky people who studied english, that is what i'm saying.

That's noble but someone has to pay for the translation. Can't fault developers for skipping languages that don't have a huge return on investment.

 

[Mivey]

I guess if you really can't afford to translate, but still want to accomodate some players, you could offer them a Google Translated version, with a warning, of course. I understand that translating text heavy games can be too expensive for indies, but this way no Italian needs to be left behind.

 

[Shao Kahn Brewing a Stew]

You'll never see a game fully localized into hindi/urdu, and that's a language spoken by billions. It's all about the $$$ baby. Only games like FIFA will get localized to Arabic, and it's because it's a game that sells really well in middle eastern countries.

Let's change his tweet a bit to other nations that never get games localized and see how many more get frustrated.

Spoiler

Actually, I'll pay a dev $10,000 if they localize a game to Pashto. (maybe).

 

[ArjanN]

Dunno. Portugal is a southern European country which speaks a romance language, and last I heard, we were supposed to be decent at English. And I don't have any reason to doubt that, either; I've seen natives speak in English in different situations and contexts, with varying degrees of fluency.

I don't know if it's because we don't dub movies. Germany does, and they're superb at English too, so I don't know, but here's a map anyway:

Germany being superb at english seems a bit generous. I guess it's relative, but being Dutch I always got the impression their english was generally worse than ours, exactly because since they dubbed/translated everything it meant they had less exposure to English.

I'm guessing the internet is making this less of a thing nowadays though.

 

[Aters]

fucking this. chinese or arabic is more spoken but none of these people would dare to touch the original product nor purchase it for the original price.

Sometimes they sell better in China than in the west when it comes to some niche Japanese games. When the population is big enough, a tiny proportion of it is still a big market. I guess it's the exact opposite for Italy.

 

[Maintenance]

I hate when devs force you to play on your language. Dirt Rally is like that and it's plain bullshit, the game is amazing but having to deal with terrible co-pilots and translated menus is not a good thing.

 

[exmachina64]

I see games as a piece of art and culture, so i don't think we should always think on a selling point of view, but as acess to culture, i know part of the blame is in part because the State doesn't think like that, but that is also true in the gaming comunity.

Games should be more acessible to more people, not only lucky people who studied english, that is what i'm saying.

Who will pay for it? Everything has a cost.

Let'a try to be level-headed here, few games sell well enough to be translated into many languages. Most indie games don't sell well and even AAA games such as Deus Ex: Mankind Divided sell poorly compared to other AAA games.

The question of cultural value also needs to be considered. Do all games deserve to be translated or only games that are arbitrarily assigned more cultural weight? I would choose Abzû to be translated over Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare because of its art direction, soundtrack and message, but perhaps a more utilitarian view is needed. Why shouldn't games that more people play, AAA games, be translated over indie games which few will play.

 

[Gemeanie]

Good your not a dev
China doesnt buy many games in comparison. Same for Brazil. Germany buys a lot of games and they hate if they cant choose their own language. I sold for a long time games to a lot of Germans and i would get so so so many cancellations when people didnt read the text enough when a game was the English version.. Italy is even worse.

I'd say Traditional Chinese is enough because Taiwan and HK gamers do care about localisation and they are the actual Chinese language market, with SEA Chinese as bonus, never the Mainland.
Most people in China understand Traditional Chinese and most original supporter imports from HK anyway

 

[M3d10n]

I guess if you really can't afford to translate, but still want to accomodate some players, you could offer them a Google Translated version, with a warning, of course. I understand that translating text heavy games can be too expensive for indies, but this way no Italian needs to be left behind.

A lot of low budget mobile games actually do this, with hilarious results (specially when it's a Chinese game that was google translated into English).

Machines will revolt against mankind well before they learn to make proper translations.

 

[cHaOs667]

Thats spanish tho.

The italian way is "che sara sara".

Damn, I'm too late...

 

[kvn]

Oh god the answers in this thread. Pure prejudice and uninformed opinions everywhere.

 

[2+2=5]

I'm italian and i dunno how to feel about this, on one hand reading that translating to italian is a waste hurts on the other hand it probably means that italians are more skilled in english than i thought, actually i have always thought that italian was mandatory if you wanted to have good sales in Italy lol.

EDIT:
oh and about that stupid comment about italians buying only AAA games, i only play on vita that is known for having a library full of indies and small or mid budget games, just saying

 

[Screaming Meat]

Whata mistaka to maka

Spoiler

I'm so sorry

 

[Izcarielo]

Italian average gamer do not support indie projects. Here people only plays FIFA, GTA and triple AAA games or other well known franchise. When a game is not localized, even if its lacking of an Italian dubbing, someone think about skipping a game entirely. Why someone should translate a game when no one is going to buy it? It's not worth it. The developer is wrong on one point: no one here talk English really well (even an university student like me have some problem with the language)

Unfortunately, the same happens in Spain.
It blowns my mind that people around ~25 are still uncapable of constructing comprehensible phrases in english although they have been studying it for years.
That speaks volumes about the level of implication people usually have when learning foreign languages...

 

[El Topo]

Germany being superb at english seems a bit generous.

It's not generous, it's utter bullshit and simply not true. A vast amount of Germans simply don't speak English very well and even among very educated people their understanding of the English language is oftentimes not sufficient to fully appreciate/enjoy media in English. There is a reason why movies and shows get dubbed and it's not because studios are generous.

 

[Forkball]

how can you function in the modern western world, not knowing english

Billions of people do it.

Literally.

I'm curious, what games are uniquely popular in Italy? Like how Saint Seiya is popular in Latin and South America for some reason.

 

[Xater]

Germany being superb at english seems a bit generous. I guess it's relative, but being Dutch I always got the impression their english was generally worse than ours, exactly because since they dubbed/translated everything it meant they had less exposure to English.

I'm guessing the internet is making this less of a thing nowadays though.

You are correct. Not being exposed to it doesn't help at all. I am mostly shocked how bad a lot of my fellow Germans are at English. I don't know how they live in this world of today. I would feel boxed in, deprived of content and opportunities.

 

[Kaname]

Well, I'm Italian and I think that, while I agree for some parts with his reasoning, generalizing the translation process as a waste of money is a bit stupid. Sure, I see the point coming from a software house that develops sort of "niche" games but try, for example, to tell EA or Ubisoft to stop translating games into Italian because it's a waste of money. They'll probably laught at you.
As many others have pointed out the biggest chunk of money to be found in the Italian gaming market is found in AAA games. If they a lot of advertisement support, even better. The average guy that buys games at Gamestop doesn't go there to buy a Paradox game or some unknown indie game. Those are the players that are fine with a game in English instead of a piss poor italian translation made in a rush to save money (and it happened, even from some prominent software houses). The thing is, most people think they are entitled to a translation because it's being sold in their country.

They underestimate the costs and time required to pull off a proper localization (even more if they plan to dub it).

Take for example the Yakuza series: the first (or even the second, don't remember) was localized in Italian and it sold an embarringly low amount of copies and with the sequels they dropped the language, which is to be expected, considering it's a miracle they even get translated in English in the first place. Now, either you're one of those that understands why they did that and you still support the company and buy the game because you like it, or you're one of those that outright refuse to buy it because "non c'è l'italiano e allora scaffale".
For small companies, spending a lot of money to hire a team to work on a translation just to sell maybe 200 copies more simply doesn't make sense. And they are right. There's no reason to feel treated like the 3rd wheel of the gaming world. For the same reason big companies will keep translating big budget games in Italian because the profits justifies that.

Reading fellow italians insulting him for his comment just makes me sad. Sure, he could have worded it a bit better but stop acting like little kids and it's fucking 2016. How could you not understand some basic English, especially if you like videogames? Don't buy his games and take some English classes I guess, maybe you'll stop complaining then :O

 

[Kurtofan]

Telltale almost never localizes its games now, in any languages.

 

[Durante]

Why would any developer translate a game into French, German, or Italian if they were on a budget?

Honestly it can be assumed that if you live in France, Quebec, Germany, Austria, Italy, or Switzerland you know English.

If I was a dev and had to pick and choose languages I'd pick:
English
Spanish
Mandarin
Cantonese
Brazilian Portuguese
Russian

I never play games in German, but I'm quite convinced that a German translation will net you more revenue (especially on a niche strategy PC game) than Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese and Brazilian Portuguese combined.

 

[ThatEuroGuy]

As a business decision, it is pretty awful
As far as I know many italian youngster have just a basic knowledge of english, old gamers even less and people in general just don't like subtitles
If you don't want to sell in Italy or you just want a few selected audience don't translate your games, you are doing fine

 

[Phamit]

I've heard the same thing being said by another developer (someone from Curve Digital? IDK) but for German. In other words, EFIGS is now not the golden standard of the choice of languages for European translations.

Weil if it was Curve Digital this not really surprising, because they games don't benefit from a translation anyway. Most of their games are arcade games with minimal text or very simple story and writing, no one needs a translation for that

 

[_machine]

As a business decision, it is pretty awful
As far as I know many italian youngster have just a basic knowledge of english, old gamers even less and people in general just don't like subtitles
If you don't want to sell in Italy or you just want a few selected audience don't translate your games, you are doing fine

I think it's pretty ridiculous to judge a business decision without any inkling of how much localization and localization QA costs and with data of how large percentage of the country userbase uses said language or not. It is not cheap at all, and I've seen much better ROI for some emerging markets than for traditional Euro markets.

 

[Genio88]

Che sarà sarà what will be will be....I'm italian and i do buy games, though i always play them in english for various reasons, therefore i wouldn't care about a lack of italian translations

 

[Axass]

Well, I'm Italian and I think that, while I agree for some parts with his reasoning, generalizing the translation process as a waste of money is a bit stupid. Sure, I see the point coming from a software house that develops sort of "niche" games but try, for example, to tell EA or Ubisoft to stop translating games into Italian because it's a waste of money. They'll probably laught at you.
As many others have pointed out the biggest chunk of money to be found in the Italian gaming market is found in AAA games. If they a lot of advertisement support, even better. The average guy that buys games at Gamestop doesn't go there to buy a Paradox game or some unknown indie game. Those are the players that are fine with a game in English instead of a piss poor italian translation made in a rush to save money (and it happened, even from some prominent software houses). The thing is, most people think they are entitled to a translation because it's being sold in their country.

They underestimate the costs and time required to pull off a proper localization (even more if they plan to dub it).

Take for example the Yakuza series: the first (or even the second, don't remember) was localized in Italian and it sold an embarringly low amount of copies and with the sequels they dropped the language, which is to be expected, considering it's a miracle they even get translated in English in the first place. Now, either you're one of those that understands why they did that and you still support the company and buy the game because you like it, or you're one of those that outright refuse to buy it because "non c'è l'italiano e allora scaffale".
For small companies, spending a lot of money to hire a team to work on a translation just to sell maybe 200 copies more simply doesn't make sense. And they are right. There's no reason to feel treated like the 3rd wheel of the gaming world. For the same reason big companies will keep translating big budget games in Italian because the profits justifies that.

Reading fellow italians insulting him for his comment just makes me sad. Sure, he could have worded it a bit better but stop acting like little kids and it's fucking 2016. How could you not understand some basic English, especially if you like videogames? Don't buy his games and take some English classes I guess, maybe you'll stop complaining then :O

Yes. Yes. Yes.

People here is just too laid back and lazy. Everyone thinks everything is due to them and that they shouldn't have to move a finger to obtain it.

Moreover English is a real problem in Italy, we're like the European country with the lowest percentage of people knowing the language. At the same time, we aren't doing anything to resolve the matter.

The comment from a fellow gaffer about having to know English because we're a country basing a good chunk of our economy on tourism is maybe badly worded, but is right on the spot.

 

[Bjoern the Smexy]

Localization is important.
Translating a game into Italian is just as important as translating it into German, Spanish or French.

People who say otherwise are crazy.
Not everyone is able to understand a language that's not native to them.
English is not some magical language that everyone somehow understands from the day they are born.

 

[Raist]

Dunno. Portugal is a southern European country which speaks a romance language, and last I heard, we were supposed to be decent at English. And I don't have any reason to doubt that, either; I've seen natives speak in English in different situations and contexts, with varying degrees of fluency.

I don't know if it's because we don't dub movies. Germany does, and they're superb at English too, so I don't know, but here's a map anyway:

Blue means "sub", red means "dub".

It's not an absolute rule detailing and comparing every single country. It's just an "average".

It's far easier for a french to learn spanish than english. Conversely it's far easier for a dutch to learn english than french.

 

[M3d10n]

Localization is important.
Translating a game into Italian is just as important as translating it into German, Spanish or French.

People who say otherwise are crazy.
Not everyone is able to understand a language that's not native to them.
English is not some magical language that everyone somehow understands from the day they are born.

This argument can be applied to every language in the world. But reality is that game development isn't charity and localization costs money. For Paradox, their past experience shows that Italian sales didn't change meaningfully when they localized their games to Italian. They admit it may be different for other genres.

 

[ToraShiro]

Most AAA games in the PS2 era went through what we call EFIGS localization, that is, English, French, Italian, German, Spanish. The majority of games I've worked on had these options as a standard. Sometimes it's a special case like EFIGS+J (Japanese), EFIGSJ+K (Korean), but as the demographics shift it is more likely to see EFIGSJKCBR (Chinese, Brazilian Portuguese, and Russian). As the addition of these new markets adds to the cost of localization (which can be steep depending on the game), it doesn't surprise me that smaller studios would want to possibly cut back certain language support based on sales history.

One title I worked on, Crash of the Titans, had a bizarre special case, EFIGS + Finnish, Swedish, Dutch, & Norwegian if I remember correctly. According to production staff it was because the game series sold quite well in Scandanavia and warranted special treatment (was also a game with not very much V/O which probably saved costs).

AAA doesn't seem to have a problem with it and will continue to translate wherever sufficient buyer base exists, though.

 

[Gattsu25]

I don't agree with him at all, but like the Italians say - "Que sera, sera."

Spoiler

for the uninitiated, que sera sera means "that's life"

Well, like Italians say: 私の良い先生、私は実際には英語を話します！

 

[Playsage]

Considering our general knowledge and familiarity with the English language, If you want to even consider selling your game in Italy, you better have all your text translated in Italian or kiss the potential non-hardcore audience goodbye.

Unless you are trying to appeal just to the few of us that are here on this site.

Also, congrats on painting yourself in a bad light, Mr. Van Dyke.

 

[Sickboy007]

I don't know how this 'tip' applies to the videogame market in general, as opposed to their titles.
Anyway, he's sounding a bit assholish.

 

[Kamina]

Why would any developer translate a game into French, German, or Italian if they were on a budget?

Honestly it can be assumed that if you live in France, Quebec, Germany, Austria, Italy, or Switzerland you know English.

If I was a dev and had to pick and choose languages I'd pick:
English
Spanish
Mandarin
Cantonese
Brazilian Portuguese
Russian

Skipping Frensh and German would be a huge mistake. Huge ammounts people in France, Switzerland, Austria, and Germany do not speak english, or not we'll enough.
You suggesting to add two Chinese langauges instead is crazy.

It's far easier for a french to learn spanish than english. Conversely it's far easier for a dutch to learn english than french.

Correct, french being a celtic language, while german, dutch, swedish, danish, norwegian, and english are germanic languages