What Russian players think makes a good localization: research reportAnastasia Kosareva, Demid TishinBarcelona 2015

Session outlinePresentation• Research background, goals and design• Overview of survey respondents • Summary of responses• Focus group: hypotheses and key findings• Summary• Lessons learned• Future steps

Discussion• Application scenarios

Why research?• Establish communication with end-users• Identify bottlenecks in localization production• Improve workflows on dev side and loc side• Improve image of localization vendors in

gaming community

Objectives

• Publish research summary for all stakeholders as widely as possible

• Involve publishers in discussion• Update own work instructions and loc

specification defaults

Design• Open survey on a major gaming portal– www.riotpixels.ru– 1800+ responses– 95% responses gathered over 1 week

• Representative focus-group– 100 respondents matching publicly available

player distribution reports (gender, age and platforms)

– Respondents with more detailed answers were preferred

– Inductive analysis– Hypotheses testing

The respondents

Do they care?

Localization depth

Voiceover

RU voiceovers they love

Best voiceovers, 100 respondents

RU voiceovers they hate

Worst voiceovers, 100 respondents

And the winners are…

Best voiceovers (net score) 100 respondents

Text localization – fluency

Text localization – accuracy

Text localization – design

Fan or official?

Focus group research

Pains

Mentions of localization issues, 100 respondents

Gains

Mentions of localization merits, 100 respondents

Some hypotheses we checked• Gamers with a higher proficiency in English prefer to play games in their

original language – confirmed• Women are more sensitive to gender-neutral address – not confirmed:

both men and women dislike it• Mobile gamers are more tolerant of errors than PC gamers –

controversial: close-type answers show that language fluency is equally important in the two groups, but mobile gamers were 4 times less active naming loc issues in open answers. Could be explained by less text in mobile games

• Hardcore gamers are more tolerant of gaming slang – confirmed • RPG gamers are less sensitive to abbreviations – not confirmed. Most

sensitive: simulation / tycoon players, least sensitive – arcade & puzzle players

• Hardcore gamers are less sensitive to memes – the opposite correlation shows. Could be explained by bigger immersion of hardcore gamers

Summary• Good localization is important for UX, but it’s not the decisive

factor in player's loyalty• Voiceover is appreciated – provided there’s a language switch,

and voices sound natural and match characters• Subtitles are crucial, and should match video• The majority of Russian players read all in-game text• Mistranslations are common and irritating • Bad fonts, truncations, abbreviations and gender-neutral

address all spoil UX• Russian players pay attention to text fluency, spelling and

grammar• Realisitic speech registers are crucial for UX• Swearings are generally appreciated, while gaming slang and

memes are a thumbs-down• Players lack means to give feedback on loc

dtishin@allcorrectgames.com

Lessons learned• There’s little or no correlation between age /

gender / language proficiency and core responses

• Focus on correlations between platforms / genres / time spent on gaming and localization preferences instead

• Double-check questions for clarity• Use rubrics instead of open-type questions• Sampling – use multiple / general survey

platforms (Facebook?)

dtishin@allcorrectgames.com

Future steps Involve publishers in discussion • Create a mailing list • Distribute research summary for all

stakeholders as widely as possible July 2015• Update own work instructions and loc

specification defaults • Initiate a wider-scale research• Project facilitation meeting:

Las Vegas QA & Loc Forum Dec 2015• Prepare and circulate a best practices paper

dtishin@allcorrectgames.com

What can we change?• Give loc vendors more time • Give loc vendors more context (builds, please :)• Enable efficient communication between dev

and loc• Develop common requirements to localization

quality experts • Dev: go deep with loc engineering – language

switch, fonts, text resizing and grammatical tokens

• Loop back to loc vendor for overall check before release

dtishin@allcorrectgames.com