Industry
GDC 2010: The Free Android Phone
Attendees of GDC this year received a free Android phone. After standing in a long, long line to clear all of the documents, attendees were handed a random choice of phone: Verizon Droid or a Nexus One. I, unhappily, received a Droid. And I am not the only unhappy one. There was a line of attendees with Droid in hand at... »
GDC Localization 2010: Bioware Presentation
Ryan Warden and Chris Christou from Bioware gave a solid and stunning look at what takes place at their very large projects for localization. The summary of their presentation has already been well documented for the non-localization reader here. Read it now, if you haven't already. Some bits of data that weren't included, or came out in the question-and-answer period: Mass Effect... »
Game Localization Business
In this post, you can find the four primary slides created for our GDC presentation on the business of games localization. The biggest take-away from these slides is that localization is still in its early days. Companies are still relying too heavily on their home language markets. Between 20% and 30% of publisher income is from localized SKUs. Only relatively small... »
GDC Localization Summit 2010
The GDC Localization Summit 2010 is over for the year. Tom Edwards and Miguel Bernal put on one hell of a show. They had a big success last year, and they worked hard to try to improve it. In some ways, it was bigger and better. Attendance was up (I figured about 90 to 110 people at the 2009 summit; 140... »
Off to San Francisco!
I'm off to San Francisco and GDC in the morning! If you've come here trying to figure out how to contact me, my cellphone number is 951-240-1762. Feel free to SMS (preferred) or call. Looking forward to a big time in the city. Many posts will follow the Conference if it's anything like last... »
Chinese Translations are First
I've been working on some statistics for the upcoming GDC conference. One of the stats is the popularity of languages in translation. Since no one keeps such statistics, I thought I'd actually generate the ones from my company. This is not automatically done, so it meant about an hour of crunching numbers into an Excel spreadsheet from our accounting program.... »
iPad Translations
The Apple iPad is here. Twice the price of Amazon's Kindle, but with so much more it can do that it seems cheap in comparison. And with software distribution through the App Store ... This is a game changer,... »
Videogame Statistics
A beautifully rendered, tall poster of videogame statistics. It shows clearly where the Wii focus is, and why it has been such a success. Go below the fold to see the whole thing. Source: Online... »
Facebook vs. Google; Translation Methods
A recent news article detailed Facebook and Googles "competing" translation methods. Facebook uses a crowd-sourcing/wiki methodology, which allows armies of rabid fans around the world to translate the essential parts of the Facebook interface into the languages of the world. Google, on the other hand, trusts its core ability to program a reliable, automated software interface to handle all translations... »
Blizzard’s Localization Team
Gamasutra has details on World of Warcraft's localization efforts this morning - a task that everyone in the industry needs to be aware of. This is where all of us are going in the near future. Localization translates and culturalizes World of Warcraft into 10 different languages, and Pearce notes that there are actually more people playing WoW outside of the... »