Wasting money on smaller languages

[south carmain]

I'm kind of surprised there isn't a tier for Chinese or Korean considering how they were promoting Shenmue Online...feel sorry for that fanbase a bit.

Korea have a ban on Japanese products and China's censorship laws are hard to get through. Though there is a campaign to get Chinese subs in to it.

[BayStone]

You know, now that I think about it, the 400k sort of bothers me. I'd really like to know how they came to this conclusion. Simple subtitles shouldn't really be this expensive. What am I missing here.

High quality translations can get a lot more expensive than you think, even without voice over. There's the agency, the translators and the reviewers that have to be paid and the subtitles have to be properly incorporated into the game which also takes some time. The developer also constantly needs to provide information and context for the translators for difficult and unclear passages (which is a problem with most clients, I'm experiencing it myself regualarly when working on texts).

Yeah, this is I agree with, well, most of it, but 100k still sounds too much for me. How much are these people getting payed?

EDIT: I guess a god damn lot.

[Hyo Razuki]

I'm kind of surprised there isn't a tier for Chinese or Korean considering how they were promoting Shenmue Online...feel sorry for that fanbase a bit.

I think the problem is as I said before. Now I can only speak from my personal experience when I lived in China but from what I've seen NO Chinese person buys a genuine copy of a game. Software market in China is almost 100% pirate only and the pirating guys do their own Chinese subtitles.

[Henry Spencer]

Guess I was the only one who remembers how surprised we were when Shenmue came back as Shenmue Online as Suzuki was talking about how big the fanbase in Korea and China was...I was like, "what?"

[Shenhua-Nani?]

The more people the game can reach the better imo.

You would be surprised at how many people can't speak english in Italy.

Oh and stretch goals arent tied to the amount the feature costs, i learned that with bloodstained campaign.

[Seraph87]

You know, now that I think about it, the 400k sort of bothers me. I'd really like to know how they came to this conclusion. Simple subtitles shouldn't really be this expensive. What am I missing here.

High quality translations can get a lot more expensive than you think, even without voice over. There's the agency, the translators and the reviewers that have to be paid and the subtitles have to be properly incorporated into the game which also takes some time. The developer also constantly needs to provide information and context for the translators for difficult and unclear passages (which is a problem with most clients, I'm experiencing it myself regualarly when working on texts).

Yeah, this is I agree with, well, most of it, but 100k still sounds too much for me. How much are these people getting payed?

EDIT: I guess a god damn lot.

I can't complain, some projects are really well paid.
But I wouldn't take the 400k too seriously, I think it's just a more or less random number like in other Kickstarter projects when it says "100,000$ more and you'll get another character" or something like that. I can't imagine it is possible to perfectly calculate stretch goal costs so early.

[Esppiral]

I seriously think they should drop those German, French, Spanish and Italian subtitles from the game. Why would we waste our money on those small language translations

Do you realize, that Spanish for example, is spoken by more people than english? Why alienate a huge portion of potential targets?

Also your post is so selfish...

[Hyo Razuki]

It also depends on if they are planning to translate from Japanese or English, translating from the Japanese into the other language would be more expensive (duh!).

[Hyo Razuki]

I seriously think they should drop those German, French, Spanish and Italian subtitles from the game. Why would we waste our money on those small language translations

Do you realize, that Spanish for example, is spoken by more people than english? Why alienate a huge portion of potential targets?

Also your post is so selfish...

As for native speakers, yes, Spanish has more. As for people having a good command of the language and therefor being able to play a video game in it, no. English is much bigger.

Then again, how is my post selfish? I don't get it. I want them to kick out my own language as well.

[Kenny]

I seriously think they should drop those German, French, Spanish and Italian subtitles from the game.

And while we're at it, drop the English subtitles too.

Too much of a waste. It should all go to game development. We'll all have to buy our own Japanese translation books or software to trek through it.

[Hyo Razuki]

There will be an English voice over, so yeah. I'd be fine without subtitles. :-)

[south carmain]

I seriously think they should drop those German, French, Spanish and Italian subtitles from the game. Why would we waste our money on those small language translations

Do you realize, that Spanish for example, is spoken by more people than english? Why alienate a huge portion of potential targets?

Also your post is so selfish...

As for native speakers, yes, Spanish has more. As for people having a good command of the language and therefor being able to play a video game in it, no. English is much bigger.

Then again, how is my post selfish? I don't get it. I want them to kick out my own language as well.

Because you don't bother to consider those who don't speak English. Driving out your own language doesn't mean much when you speak the language it will be released in anyway.

[Hyo Razuki]

Nobody at Sega has ever bothered to consider people who don't speak English regarding Shenmue so far , so why start with the third game? I don't think the first two games lost a lot of buyers because they were English only.

[Master Kyodai]

I am German myself and I'd also have voted to not burn money on translations. Correct me if I am wrong, but i think the original games also didn't come with a German (Or italian or whatever) translation. At least my "german" Shenmue 2 had Japanese audio and english subtitles. As far as i remember only Ryos diary was translated to German which was obviously pointless if the rest in the game is English.

I'd have loved it to see these 400,000 bucks being spend on better stuff and just release the english sub file with the game so fans can translate them themselves - as they did for the original Shenmue 1 and 2...

[south carmain]

I don't think the first two games lost a lot of buyers because they were English only.

Growing up in France I can tell you this is completely false. A lot of gamers there just straight up passed up on it because well they wouldn't be able to understand anything in it.