First of all, there are too many motion capture companies. Everywhere you turned, there was a model or two dancing on the floor with their actions mimicked onscreen in realtime behind them. This was a really cool technology when I first saw it in 1996. While interviewing with a now-defunct game company, I was with them taking motion capture for a Steven Seagal title at his dojo in Santa Monica. Today, I expect small companies have over-invested in the technology and are busy beating at each others price-points.

The biggest buzz at the show was for OnLive. Their idea is to house a console in the “cloud” and allow gamers to play to the heart’s content through their internet connection. There is substance to this idea. After all, the amount of data going back and forth is limited (screen refresh data, control signals, audio, voice). There is no reason why this idea shouldn’t work.

I talked to the chief engineer for about five minutes and he seemed extremely confident until I started asking him questions. Since I handle international issues, I asked him when he would be ready to deploy in Europe and Asia (after all, the Asian internet systems are much better than the US ones). He hesitated a long second and answered that Europe and Asia wouldn’t happen until the system works in the US. My take-away: there’s still a lot of work to be done.

There were several 3D systems. The two that I liked were a demonstration of a 3D monitor using World of Warcraft. It was slick, fast and the glasses worked well. They weren’t the old color sensitive glasses, so the 3D image was really crisp, in all the normal colors. Very cool. I did not ask how much they charged for the monitor; an answer wouldn’t make much sense either. If they can fit it with a killer app, they can sell enough to make it cheap. Which is clearly why they are showing the technology here.

A more innovative technology was augmented reality. This was a very heavy set of glasses that you put on and look around a table with assorted objects. They look exactly like they did in real life, but now you see a dinosaur walking across the table top. Very cool! Lot’s of potential applications (military ones come to mind first, games are pretty far down on the list).

Finally, booth babes have come to GDC! Brought this year by Nokia, which had the front door position (along with Crytek). They made my eyes cry with joy and wish for a return of the old E3. We’ll see this June if the new masters of E3 can get it right.

As discussed, the problem comes from several angles:

• Who is going to judge for the award? While we may have a few individuals competent to judge three, four or five languages, most big titles are now being translated into ten or more languages.
• If we choose to offer the award only for one title in one language (i.e., the German edition of Bioshock), we still need to compare different languages. Since this is always going to be a subjective judgment, who is going to decide?

The other option is to create a Wall of Shame, aka “All your base are belong to us.” This is a much easier process, since most fluent speakers can easily spot a bad translation. The Far East Economic Review had a favorite feature of signs written in bad English from India to the Philippines.

Either of these, the Award or the Wall of Shame, is subject to some political pressure. Any individual or agency will occasionally let loose with a ringer, which can be shown to all the world. If you look carefully enough, you are sure to find some which were penned by your worst enemy.

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.

The keynote speech was by Jaime Gine, Vice President of International Development Services for Electronic Arts. This man is in charge of EA’s $50 million annual budget to localize their games. And he does. I saw his work in Hungary last year, where the ONLY localized titles were the ones from his company.

I’ll post more (much more) on his speech, the other attendees and more later.

UPDATE: A more lengthly report is now available here.

I’m at GDC in San Francisco this week.

I love GDC. Even before the demise of E3 in 2006, I always preferred GDC. It was at GDC that I bumped into Bill Gates (2001, during the launch of Xbox), as well as stop Steve Jackson in his tracks for a twenty minute conversation about games, the FBI and EFF and other fun stuff. GDC is the geeky side of the gaming industry, and I really like it for that.

I’ll write about it here soon.