That’s a fair point, but in my purely anecdotal opinion, I think that development time spent on other areas would outweigh the gain of many hours spent translating the game into a multitude of other languages, each only amounting to a fraction of total sales.
Each language you translate is going to be a small amount of people. If English accounts for, say, 70% of the traffic on the website, spending the time to translate something into Spanish may account for another 10%, Portugese another 2%, Russian 2%, Polish 1%, etc. The cost of time spent translating each individual language properly probably won’t beat spending that time adding more game features.
I’m sure Roblox did some research before rolling out plans for platform-wide internationalization, but I feel like that’s probably more for the potential of gained players and not for the players they have right now. I’d like to see some statistics on this so that I can be proven wrong, but from where I’m sitting now it just doesn’t seem worth it.
While I have plans to translate my game (after it gets released!), I don’t know which language to prioritize first. It would be cool if Roblox could release stats on which language players use as their system default.
This. I need location data on my games’ players: where are they playing, what is the average revenue from people in these locations, how long are they playing. I can’t waste money catering to the French speaking users if there are no French users playing my game to begin with.
To be serious about it though, I’m really glad these localization tools came out. Before them, I imagined making a game that would never come out (because I can’t finish anything for the life of me) with a language selector option and full translation. These tools are so awesome and help us to support diverse communities of non-English speakers. The tools also let them feel included and welcome in a game that uses their native tongue.
and for people like me I can just change my local language and read off translations of text
Ultimate Boxing isn’t popular enough right now for me to consider the costs of multiple languages, and I have no stats of which languages to prioritize, game wise and platform wise. There is also the fact I need to trust my translators not to make mistakes as I have no way to make sure the grammar is correct.
I think the point though is that with these localization tools, this could change. It would be nice to see some before and after stats on what games have experienced a few months from now.
Absolutely planning to localize Sound Volblox, specifically to Spanish and Japanese, mainly since the game is based on a Japanese arcade game in the first place, and we have quite a few Spanish-speaking players.
If I understand the system correctly, it automatically translates the game based on their locale, if so I’m not going to be using it, but instead make my own system where players can choose the language they want to play my game in as some people like to do that for learning or because they prefer a language.
our dev team is planning on translating our game, strikeout, into spanish and any other languages that might be worth our effort. (the game isn’t out yet)
Temple of Memories supports Chinese, German, Danish, English and French almost completely.
However, we use our own system, relying on http://wiki.roblox.com/index.php?title=API:Class/LocalizationService/SystemLocaleId and a slightly different system for detecting text and formatting it in-game while allowing for users to change their language and for us to translate more than just Text properties.
This was made while the official tools were still under development, of which I plan on switching over to the official system at a later point in time.
When you’re testing in studio do you have any errors in the console?
This could happen if a property setter was throwing an error and messing up game loading. This should never happen but it’s possible that we made a mistake. If it is happening you would see an error in the console early on.
I tested the system by making the Menu for my game translate over to Spanish. The system works really easy, but I’m afraid I don’t think implementing it in the actual game areas would do much as 95% of the text in game is either the word “Expansion” which in Spanish is “Expansión” or are Proper Nouns. But hey, at least the menu, right?
I’ve already started translating my loadout menu, so yes I am planning on localizing Crossroads Warfare. However, I don’t know the effects of translating the menu or the game to Spanish yet, so I’ll see what happens.
Great.
