Gaming offers us regular opportunities to engage in playful behaviour, taking a step back from the stresses of everyday life. It also leads us down paths towards creativity, stimulating us and making us quicker thinkers and more effective multi-taskers. It has a positive effect on our wellness, and our coping skills, so it’s hardly surprising that there are approximately 3 billion gamers in the world today. Over half are in the APAC region, and while many speak excellent English, we must respect the wishes of those who prefer to communicate in their native Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese or Malay. We must also respect the nuance of gaming language.
Gamers who can’t wait for exciting new titles to be localized for their territory might be tempted to take matters into their own hands. The results can be uninspiring. When Bandai Namco released Sword Art Online: Hollow Fragment in April 2014, its impact in Japan was instant. The game sold 145,029 physical retail copies in its first week of release in Japan. By the end of 2014 that domestic sales figure had almost doubled to 280,000 copies.
This Japanese release included an option to change the game language to English, and many English speakers eager to sample the experience imported a copy of Hollow Fragment and did exactly that. The result was an incoherent mess of broken English, and incorrectly wrapped text that frequently ran off the screen and out of player view. Hollow Fragment offered gamers a choice of over 100 characters to accompany them in this exciting world. With so much lost in translation, though, it proved to be a very hollow experience.
Bandai Namco reacted swiftly and smartly, releasing a professionally localized version of the game in the West that preserved the dynamism and coherence of the original. They recognized that players want to immerse themselves in the world game developers have created, and simple mistakes will quickly break the spell.
Gridly is the brainchild of Christoffer Nilsson and Mattias Wennerholm, entrepreneurs who are also ex-game developers. They founded Localize Direct and then Gridly out of love for the gaming experience and determination to make that experience as immersive and enjoyable as possible for players all over the world. The outcome is a product that, although relatively new to the market, is the content localization tool of choice for entertainment leaders including WB Games, The Pokemon Company and Tencent.
Gridly offers users the familiarity and convenience of a spreadsheet combined with the functionality of a headless CMS. It enables easy storage of images and audio files, making it an ideal one-stop home for all categories of content. It’s designed to give users easy access to translation memories and localization glossaries, and it enables multiple stakeholders to localize into multiple languages simultaneously.
Yes, really.
Gridly is that user-friendly, it adds that much value, and it saves that much time.
Game localization professionals are under constant pressure to deliver swift, accurate, nuanced content. Gamers want more, they want it now, and they want it in language they won’t just understand but will also warmly embrace. It’s their world, and it’s our job to make them comfortable in it.
Gridly is meeting a need among gamers and game localization professionals.
Let it meet yours.
Let us demonstrate to you that, thanks to Gridly, content localization just got smarter.
