Wasting money on smaller languages

(Chapter 7 and beyond)

Re: Wasting money on smaller languages

Postby south carmain » Tue Jun 23, 2015 4:59 am

ys wrote: It likely will be good for the overall sales. The only thing that I wish is that they don't make it another $100000 gap. I once wrote a post about localization costs for Yakuza. The estimates that I found from a professional localization company (who had worked for EA, Sega, Microsoft,...) was around 4000 euro for a text-heavy game.

Hyo Razuki wrote: Do we really have to discuss the status of English as the world's lingua franca on here? Come on, you can answer that question by yourself. If Chinese was the lingua franca the game would have come out with Chinese dub instead of English and we would be writing Chinese on here.

I agree. Just like scientific works were written in Latin during medieval times and even up until the 1700's etc.

south carmain wrote:If we're using total number of speakers as a reason to release the game in whatever language beside Japanese then they might as well just release it in China in chinese since that's where they'll get the maximum amount of speakers for one language.

Though not necessarily a lot more sales when you look at reports about the rampant piracy in China.

As for English, you could probably look a bit beyond native speakers. Where I grew up we have to study 4-5 different languages during our school time. Knowing three of them is often expected when you look for jobs, with English being one of the major ones. So you could include a few extra markets where people, especially gamers, at least have a "near-native" understanding of English.

The 841 million number includes all English speakers in the world not just native speakers. I should also probably point out that I was being sarcastic and I am fully aware that the English speaking market is more appealing than the Chinese market for multiple reasons including piracy, purchasing power and the fact that there aren't just 75 thousand PS4s sold in it and people don't primarily play online games.
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Re: Wasting money on smaller languages

Postby ys » Tue Jun 23, 2015 5:06 am

Oh, ok. My mistake. I got the impression that the number was native speaking only. And I'm usually good at detecting sarcasm but didn't see it this time. Text, you know...
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Re: Wasting money on smaller languages

Postby south carmain » Tue Jun 23, 2015 5:14 am

ys wrote: Oh, ok. My mistake. I got the impression that the number was native speaking only. And I'm usually good at detecting sarcasm but didn't see it this time. Text, you know...

Well it's everyone who speaks the language as L1 and L2 across the world. Though looking in to it more you may be right as there is also 700 million listed as foreign language to the side.

However by L2 it seems they mean countries like Pakistan where English is an official language but the majority really don't speak English that well so I don't know at what proficiency most of these people with it as a foreign language speak it.
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Re: Wasting money on smaller languages

Postby Phong » Tue Jun 23, 2015 8:09 am

Subtitles don't actually cost $400,000. The subtitle goals are there to get people from other countries donating to the kickstarter.

Simple as that.
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