Paris GDC: All Game Development Is Local(ized)

by on 10 September, 2008 - 15:03

by: Reinout te Brake

During a session held at the Paris Game Developers Conference, Electronic Arts VP of international development services Jaime Gine highlighted the crucial importance of localization in maintaining robust worldwide sales.

Focusing on the European markets, Gine described experiments, studies, and statistics that defined differences between various countries when it comes to providing appropriate video game localization.

Over the last few years, the company has started introducing new localized SKUs into markets already seeing sales of certain non-localized titles.For example, Total Club Manager was localized for the Italian market for the first time in EA's 2005 fiscal year, while FIFA was localized in Poland for the first time in the 2006 fiscal year.Soccer is demanding from a localization standpoint, because of the vast amount of audio recordings, but the investment paid off - FIFA saw 60% sales increases in Poland after localization, while Total Club Manager sales jumped a staggering 400% in Italy.For the Russian market, EA tried a similar but slightly different experiment. "We thought, what if we take the products we’ve already launched in English, localize them, and release them again?" explained Gine.Read on here! Sphere: Related Content

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