Crowdsourced MMO Translations

One of the primary reason's why MMO developers partner with publisher is because they need a local partner to localize their games. Korean developers like XL Games (ArcheAge) and Actoz (Dragon Nest and La Tale) focus on making good games, or at least trying to. It doesn't make sense for XL Games to spend time, money, and effort localizing ArcheAge for Western audiences when they can just license their game to Trion Worlds and let them handle all the translations, billing, maintenance, etc. Larger companies like Perfect World (Arc Games) and Nexon have their own in-house localization teams as well as subsidiaries in the U.S. and Europe, so they don't need to rely on separate publishers. This allows game developers to focus on making the games while publishers localize and distribute games. But what if more developers could self-publish their own games? A big hurdle in this is localization and it looks like the folks behind Tree of Savior, IMCGames, have the localization problem figured out.

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The game's development team is using its community to crowd source its localization. Much like Wikipedia, players will be able to actively contribute translations to the game. The beauty of this system is that the game only needs a few hardcore fans to get A LOT of translations done. Just look at Wikipedia – something most of us use regularly, but almost never contribute to. The developers are pushing to get Tree of Savior localized into English first, but plan to add other languages next. The developer already uploaded the Open Text Client (OTC) files to GitHub and players can begin contributing translations. I suspect by the time the game reaches full launch in the U.S., Tree of Savior will have some of the best translations of any Korean MMORPG. Poor translations a real problem in MMOs too. A majority of free to play games in the West are developed in either China or Korea and they're usually translated mechanically, which results in really awkward quest text and other issues.

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Just because a game developer can crowd source their translations, doesn't mean they're going to succeed without a publisher. At least not right away. Having a partner overseas to handle customer support and billing has its advantages. This is definitely the first step though towards more and more developers self-publishing their own titles. From a player's perspective, I'd like to see more games go the self-published route, because it cuts out the middle man, which usually means updates are released quicker. As-is, most Korean servers for popular games in the West are months, if not years, ahead in terms of content updates. A single global version of a game, with well localized servers, would mean no difference between foreign and local versions of that game.

By, Omer Altay