Game Global Digital Summit

An introduction from our organizers and a quick recap on how to use the platform.

Bigpoint and XTM will Look at the challenges faced when handling a high-frequency of updates combined with a manual LocQA process on their titles. Then describe how they worked together to create a continuous localization process using Git to embed a QA phase, enabling the QA team to capture, edit, and update changes on the fly.

In this presentation we will introduce our EA data analytics team focus: how to approach machine learning strategies, player data and data infrastructure in order to radically change localization toward a data driven business strategy. We will discuss how to develop a data strategy as well as the connection between game development and localization.

How do we manage distributed and remote work in the social distancing era? How do we solve the challenges when it comes to hardware, access and IPs? We will discuss with panelists from different areas of our industry: audio localization, functional quality assurance and localization quality assurance. After our panel discussion, we will open to a round table with all our attendees.

From 2016 to 2019 India has had a 190% growth rate of apps downloaded. Forty billion apps downloaded in 2019. The mobile platform, mainly Android and iOS, is the preferred weapon of choice for entertainment, streaming, banking and productivity. For gaming the free-to-play (F2P) market is by far the biggest, meaning that most monetization is ad-based for now. The willingness to spend money on games is however on the rise, most notably in top games like PUBG Mobile.

From a localization perspective, India has 122 main languages, 11 of which have at least 30 million speakers. Is there a window of opportunity for publishers to gain access to an almost untapped market with games localized in these languages? We believe there might be!

Similar to Brazil ten years ago, India is showing all the right signs of being ready to play more games and creating opportunity for other business models than F2P. Understanding India, its languages, culture, economic development and more specifically distribution, marketing user acquisition and so on, is vital to understand which games would be relevant to release in India in other languages than English. Character has looked into the numbers and will be presenting their insights and doubts on this growing market.

Translating for videogames requires an immense amount of attention to detail which is only possible with a deep knowledge of each specific IP.

• How does this match with the flexibility and scale required by the fast-paced game localization market?
• Does investing time and resources in getting to know your gaming translators main areas of expertise, content preferences and daily capacity, translate into a better gaming experience?
• What do we need to build and maintain our translation resource profiles? (entry tests, previous gaming experience, what games they play, favorite IPs, hobbies/passion).
• And how to deal with the cultural aspects of managing multilanguage teams?

Veterans of the videogame localization industry, from both the developer and service provider sides, will try to answer these questions during this round table.

The presentation aims at walking the audience through the steps taken by Localization to offer Google Stadia among their testing platforms.
The presentation will include: a brief summary of concepts and terms specific to Stadia, a review of the technical setup that led to the successful delivery of several projects and the challenges and opportunities that emerged in the process.
We will also present on the LQA testing strategies employed through a comparison with other platforms and the specifics of Localization compliance.

In the age of digital marketing, with the focus shifting to data and traffic, sometimes an idea can go from initial concept to testing within mere hours. How do we integrate localization into this fast-paced process, while making it as painless as possible for all the parties involved, and still deliver the best possible quality in the shortest time? Playrix, one of the biggest mobile game developers in the world, produces enormous amounts of digital content in order to get a sizeable share of traffic. We will talk about how we use templates, how we approach fonts and what texts are safe to reuse. We will also show how we educate our marketing team about localization, how we work with translators and why it’s important to know the basic principles of user acquisition and app store optimization. Managing localization for modern digital ads can be challenging, but we can definitely make it less painful.

We will present a case study on our experience localizing racing and rallying simulation titles and the challenges faced when the content is closely related to the lingo used in international and local competitions and the way events are narrated in each player region. We will approach this topic simultaneously from cultural localization and publishing angles, drawing examples and solutions implemented in recent projects.

Takeaways:

Attendees will learn about key factors that will play a significant part in the success of racing localization projects involving voiceover of context-sensitive commentator text; how to approach technical descriptions of customizable components based on real-life models and products; and how to elaborate on solutions drawing from specific examples and solutions implemented by our team while working with the development studio represented in the presentation.

We would like to turn our learnings into an entertaining presentation that could be useful for other studios working on projects with similar features, such as the need to localize dynamic voiceover in a way that is meaningful to the players.

In this session we will present the data from our localization user surveys, share best practices and potential pitfalls, and explain how we have used the feedback to improve our localization program and increase the support of our stakeholders. We will introduce our set-up (what did we ask the players and how?), share our major findings (what were the survey results?) in words and numbers, and how different aspects of localization were affected. We will give insight on the action points we took as a consequence and how successfully we involved our stakeholders. We are looking forward to discussing our lessons learned, pros and cons of player surveys and your own experiences, input and ideas for further improvements.

Building up on the knowledge we previously shared at Game Global Lisbon, we will focus on a case study on FIFA and other franchise-specific titles to highlight how much you can improve the quality by creating specific machine translation engines with the data of the game. We will share some details in terms of processes to prepare the engines, but especially a quality comparison between text translated with a generic engine and a text translated with a specific engine.

What is game writing and how is it related to localization, narrative design and user experience writing? What are the daily challenges of a game writer at Socialpoint and the best practices to speed up and ensure quality in the localization process? In this presentation, we will go through these hot topics and more, sparking an interesting conversation with other developers on the benefits and challenges of collaboration between game writing and localization.

Localization is usually an afterthought in the design of user experience (UX) and especially in the content creation process. What if localization and UX

writers, the creators of the content we translate, were one team? Join this session to learn more about UX writing and how localization can raise its profile by collaborating with UX professionals to meet the needs of international users.

Takeaways:

Attendees will find out what UX writing is and its fundamental principles; how UX writers and localization can work together to meet the needs of global users; and how localization can work closer with source content creators in order to get a seat at the table.

Let’s break the silos. Collaboration between localization and UX professionals is the key to have strong advocates that consider an international community of users and raise the profile of localization within companies.

Wrap up with the Game Global team.