52: WGE MAG
Bag It! Goes Local
I
n December of 2010, my partners and I started Hidden Variable Studios, an independent mobile game developer, after years of working in console development for companies like THQ, Insomniac Games and Liquid Entertainment. There have been plenty of trials and tribulations since our inception; however, one of the most challenging has been the decision to localize our game. The thought of localizing seemed overwhelming at first, but we eventually realized that it is ultimately akin to the question “How do you eat an elephant?” The answer? “One bite at a time”.
When we started developing our first game, Bag It!, we weren’t sure if we were going to localize it or not. While our primary target market was North America (since our game is based on common U.S. supermarket products) the data had shown that
making the game available globally would increase our sales. That said, the task seemed somewhat overwhelming for a small start-up studio.
There were so many questions to be answered, including the cost of localizing (both internally and externally with vendors and partners), distribution channels, how to localize for different countries, associated price points, PR, and countless other items. Prior to making the final decision to localize, we knew that such a significant decision would require a lot research. Thus began our quest to gather information.
We reached out to everyone we could think of to help us make an informed decision--fellow developers, the IGDA Localization SIG, vendors, and of course, the web. The data from large companies that had localized their games was fairly easy to find, but finding information about how or if smaller indie developers had localized was not an easy task. It was a challenge to piece together the fragments and often disjointed data points that we had gathered and to make sense of the sometimes conflicting information.
Nonetheless, after weeks of research we concluded that we would localize the game in 7 different languages, but we would wait to do it until after our initial launch. Confident in our plan, we first released Bag It! in English-speaking countries on November 17th.
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