SCEE boss David Reeves claims that developers don't want to translate their games for Europe because they don't think it's worth the effort. There's not enough incentive for them to translate the games during development, so that's why we're left waiting up to six months for something like Brawl -- the developers just don't care. That's right, Europe -- according to Reeves, developers actually cannot be f*cked with you.
Reeves said he would "love" to have worldwide release dates for everything, but states he could only do that with the UK, and fears that if he excluded the rest of Europe, he'd upset everyone else.
"Well some developers would say they can do [translations during initial development]. Talk to Ted Price at Insomniac and he builds it in at the beginning," stated Reeves. "We're trying to educate all our developers to do that but it's something that's going to take a while."
"But even if you talk to Guerrilla, Namco, Square Enix, they all do it in English to begin with and then think about localization later. You're absolutely right, we should do it at the beginning. But they look at it like, 'How much can I get for a Dutch version of the game?'
So, developers don't care because they don't think our money is worth it. Fair enough I suppose, but are they seriously trying to claim that the time/cost of translating a game is not more than covered by the sales of that game in an entire union of countries? With the ridiculous expense of games in the UK alone, I find it hard to swallow that our money really isn't worth the effort. Do the Dutch really not buy videogames? If that's the case, why are they bothering at all? It seems like a rather short-sighted excuse from developers to me.
"With PlayStation Store we could probably go in the UK almost day and date. But then what are the Germans and the French going to say to me? That I'm Anglo-centric," added Reeves. I can at least partially understand that -- the last thing you need is to be called a pro-Britain fanboy.
05/08/2008 14:27
Picture every single piece of english text in a game: billboards, road signs, car dashboards, computer screens, kmh versus mph, centimetres vs. inches, etc.
Then you have to make sure every single piece is translated, and every single measurement is correct. If you get a single thing wrong? MASSIVE fine - we're talking tens of thousands of dollars for EACH COPY of the game sold like that.
I'd love every country to have games at the same time - but until less draconian methods are put in place, it simply won't happen.
05/08/2008 14:28
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05/08/2008 14:41
Maybe just push the engrish language on everyone, oh and the bible and everything will be hoky doky.
05/08/2008 14:41
05/08/2008 14:51
05/08/2008 14:52
Unfortunately it doesn't change the release date...
English in games rock!
05/08/2008 14:57
05/08/2008 15:05
Just out of curiosity, where do these massive fines come down from? And who is ultimately responsible for paying them?
05/08/2008 15:33
The payoff for doing properly though should be more than enough to justify it. French, German, Italian and Spanish gamers do appreciate games in their own language. If you want to reach them you localize.
05/08/2008 15:33
I believe the production company takes the innitial blame (and fine), but they <i>may</i> be able to pass it on to whoever actually created the game.
I remember that one game had had it happen, and shipments had to be <i>halted</i> because of what it cost the company.
05/08/2008 15:37
05/08/2008 16:14
05/08/2008 16:23
05/08/2008 16:39
But for some reason more and more games only have the german dub on the disk. Makes no sense. It's like they want to say: "We paid for this crappy dub, now you WILL listen to it!"
05/08/2008 17:05
05/08/2008 17:31
It would help them learn speaking English in fact, just like it did to me! I could actually comunicate with people online in Starcraft when I was 10 years old! I'm not kidding here.
05/08/2008 17:55
05/08/2008 19:40
I can't even remember the last time I played a Dutch language game, in fact having a game translated would be more likely to convince me not to buy it.
05/08/2008 21:30
how is sony lying? they never said that they didn't do this... but if you do look at the games that they publish, it does seem that they release less games in the US/japan first. at least not the ones that i care about... basically uncharted/motorstorm/R&C/heavenly storm/gran turismo... but yeah, they definitely are culprits... but your point that they lied is wrong. :)
05/08/2008 21:38
My bullshit detector went off.
05/08/2008 23:43
05/09/2008 00:14
I would assume more than 80% (conservatively) of the games are played in English anyway.
05/09/2008 05:03
When will these people understand that everybody and their european mother speak english by now. Especially the gaming crowd! Especially the dutch gaming crowd!
So they have this huge market in front of them and the only problem to solve is the pal/ntsc thingy for those old tv sets. Wow...these people really must hate money...