QA AND LOCALISATION ROUNDTABLE Testing the waters
With different regions and gaming platforms demanding new kinds of quality assurance, James Batchelor and Dominic Sacco speak to top localisation firms about emerging trends and challenges
AS CONSUMERS opt for bigger games of a higher quality, the need for these products to undergo vigorous testing is stronger than ever. This essential step of the production process, combined with huge growth in the digital, social and casual gaming sector, has resulted in a boom for some QA and localisation firms. Companies like Universally Speaking and Testology have had to expand their teams to cope. Social and mobile games gives these specialists more projects that are quicker to complete.
Meanwhile, more publishers are turning to QA firms earlier to ensure their products reach the highest possible standard.
But several challenges and debates remain. The industry is divided as to whether the localisation sector needs standardised practices. Motion controls and 3D gaming is making firms rethink their testing strategy. And with cloud gaming and Wii U around the corner, how can the sector best prepare itself for the changes ahead? We asked several key industry figures to find out.
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ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PUBLISHERS AND QA FIRMS
Vickie Peggs, MD, Universally Speaking: “We have noticed a shift towards early discussions
with publishers. This is unfortunately still not the case with all publishers, although the signs are encouraging. With the addition of new languages, publishers are establishing contact early on to request support and advice on how to handle these. This is having a very positive effect and will hopefully extend to all games.”
Andrew Day, CEO, Keywords International: “In our experience, the relationships are
improving. Publishers are more willing to partner with strategic QA vendors and share more openly scheduling information which allows for better planning and ultimately an improved QA service. It would be good to see more long term strategic deals between QA vendors and publishers and less project by project bidding.”
Stefan Seicarescu, CEO, Quantic Lab:
“What we found out in the last year is that publishers
are more careful when choosing their projects. Also decreasing production costs is a much more interesting challenge. For example, when buying a project, publishers now choose a much more polished game near to final milestone than in previous years. Also they avoid long production cycles and favour digital distribution.”
ON REGIONS WITH AN INCREASED DEMAND FOR LOCALISATION Vickie Peggs:
Andy Robson, MD, Testology: “We’ve seen an increase from studios in San
Francisco, but we haven’t really had to change the way we normally work. We are in a different time zone but that generally seems to work in the client’s favour as we are testing while they are asleep. So when they wake they have many bugs logged. We have previously worked shifts so we are working alongside our client’s time zone.”
“Due to the sharp rise of social and casual games, we have seen an increase
in titles localised into South American and Asian languages; Turkish, Arabic, Malaysian, Thai and Hindi have become standard for many of our clients. With this bigger focus in additional languages, we have had to increase our fulltime teams to accommodate this substantial boost in demand compared to this time last year.”
Alastair Harsant, VP, operations for games services, Testronic: “As Japanese games firms
are becoming more Eurocentric, and as the Japanese game market percentage reduces, Testronic is being called upon to give a higher quality of localisation and proofreading for Western languages for them. Plus, larger publishers are translating games into Eastern European, Scandinavian, Turkish and Greek languages.”
September 9th 2011 43
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