GDC Localization Summit 2009 Quick Notes
Back home in Southern California. Ahh, it feels good to be home—the right coffee mug, comfortable office, wicked-fast internet connection, hard-wired to the company server. Ahh, the good things of life! Not to mention family and friends!
Today, I’m going to scribble down a few of the general overview notes on the GDC Localization Summit. I may get a few things wrong—if so, please correct me in the comments. Digital recordings of the proceedings will be available in three weeks, and I expect to be able to give more detailed (and less prejudiced) material at that time. Stay tuned for updates!
Here are some of my semi-random notes:
Tom Edwards opens the session with a warm welcome and some numbers. Using figures from PriceWaterhouseCoopers, he shows the global market for videogames should rise from $39 billion in 2008 to $48 billion in 2009, even with a world-wide recession. EA already reports that more than 50% of its business comes from localized SKU’s. The fastest industry growth through 2012 should be in India and China.
Personal aside: I take all sales numbers with a grain of salt. Nothing is more jealously guarded by any corporate entity than its sales figures. Even public companies are extremely careful what to divulge in their annual reports. Quoted, industry-wide figures can be quite wide of the mark even in North America and Western Europe. Once other parts of the world are included, these figures are no more accurate than their methodologies. Don’t take them too seriously.
A discussion of India sparked a number of comments. One participant mentioned doing studies on the 20 different languages of India to determine the best ones for localization from a business standpoint. China, fortunately, has solidified with spoken Mandarin for most entertainment (though voice acting in Cantonese and Min/Fukkianese/Taiwanese might be valuable).
As might be natural, Tom emphasized Culturalization, the concept of localizing titles entirely (storyline, art, text, voice, music, etc.) for their target markets. It’s an all-embracing concept, one that his company specializes in.
The number of languages translated has expanded immensely in the past three to five years. Every speaker and every active localization member agreed on this. When most of us entered the business, localization was strictly French, Italian, German and Spanish (FIGS). Today, all games coming from Sony Europe are routinely translated into ten languages: FIGS, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Finnish and Portuguese. Over the next year, Russian and Polish will be added.
Personal aside: This fits with Apogee’s experience as well, though the language list is different. When we started in 1998, our orders were strictly for FIGS. As of 2007, Simplified Chinese was our fifth biggest language, with a substantial number of our orders calling for 15 working languages.
Additional aside: For whatever reason, the Summit speakers appeared largely concentrated on European languages and cultures. When Chinese, Thai or Indian languages were brought up, it was not typically for the opportunities that they presented, but for the problems that they posed. There were audience members from Japan and the Japanese videogame conglomerates, but they were largely silent during the presentation.
In a polling of the speakers, it was generally agreed that Polish and Russian were the “low-hanging fruit”; relatively easy to localize, with substantial business rewards for doing so.
Jaime Gine, Vice President of International Development Services for Electronic Arts gave the keynote address. I’ll place substantial notes on this once the full text is available, but here is an overview. His words should be taken quite seriously, as he handles the largest game localization operation in the world, costing more than $50 million a year with major offices in Spain and Singapore.
Jaime used three languages as his samples: Spanish (European), Swedish and Polish. He contrasted the market needs for localization of each. Spain, in general, expects all games to be full localized with recognizable voice actors where appropriate. Jaime gave a great example of the difference between Spanish and German soccer announcers. Swedes, with their relative fluency and comfort with English, were most interested in having subtitles on the screen and fully translated user manuals. The Polish market requires complete localization. Only the hardcore gamers will have fun playing through an alien language like English.
Jaime gave substantial figures on the effects of localization. He was able to do so by showing statistics of backlist (older) titles that were localized and re-released in Poland and other countries. Sales of FIFA, for instance, jumped 500% in Poland once the localized versions were available. In Russia, the effect was even greater.
While not sharing exact numbers, Jaime did mention that there were significant business differences to localizing for Spain and Poland. Being a full Western economy, games in Spain can be sold for 50€ each, while in Poland and Russia games more typically go for 30€. In other words, more games need to be sold in order to justify the costs of localization.
Jaime was clear that he was giving older information (from 2007). He expertly avoided discussing any of the Asian languages, beyond the obvious: “You simply MUST localize into those languages.”
I have not included the discussions of translation tools or a few of the other sessions, either for lack of personal notes or that there was little startling to be said. The take-away from this session is that the 75 people in the room there that day are essential to about half of the industry’s revenue—billions of dollars a year.
And the business is expanding.
Rapidly.
[...] UPDATE: A more lengthly report is now available here. [...]