GCA Staff Notes by Malcolm – 1

Mr. Malcolm Stuart Grant is the most recent addition to the GET teaching team at Temasek Polytechnic, and is formerly from Guerrilla Games and worked on Killzone 2. I asked if he could write on his experiences. Here’s the first, and it’s for GCA.:)

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Thursday September 17

14:00-14:50 “The history of Cultured Localization:  Taking on the eternal challenge of crossing Cultural borders”

Yasuhide Kobayashi, Senior Vice President, Japan Studio.

Kobayashi-san was here talking about localization. I thought it was quite ironic that for a talk about localization he was talking in japanese and you had to use the translation device to actually hear the talk. He quickly discussed the workings of Sony and World Wide studios, having worked with Sony, I’ve seen the inner workings slide before.

The different regions are essentially seperate companies and to release in another region you have to “sell it” to the other regions. They will then deal with regionalization of the game, change box art, rename characters and deal with the languages for that region. He showed the audience a chart of various other companies and their domestic market share for japan and how much they rely on the home market. Capcom, Squenix, namco. JapanStudio was the lowest domestic percentage share with products and Yasuhide stated that they have to deal with trying to sell to a more worldwide market.

At this point you could argue that it’s the type of games and demographic that they are trying to sell to which could be their problem. Square enix have dragon quest which sells hUGELY in japan and although translated, I don’t believe does well in the west. When final fantasty does ok numbers (compared to the population) in japan, sells a LOT more in the west.

He then discussed a few games developed by JapanStudio: ICO, Rogue Galaxy and Everybody’s golf.

He then showed the differences in box art in these titles. Ico was first,
with the European box on the left :

http://www.pwned.com/gamecovers/playstation2/d0bd3fcb9f628e61987a0366e437c9ab-Ico.jpg (below)

and the US box on the right:

http://img.search.com/thumb/6/64/Ico_box_usa.jpg/180px-Ico_box_usa.jpg

He said to the audience to clap is they liked the left one (european box) and there was a substancial applause (albeit delayed), then pointed to the US box (expecting a somewhat muted clap) the applause was about the same. I was disappointed. He also said that he might need to change the talk in the future. This was to show that it’s not just changing languages for localization, but you make need to take in the market that the game will be released in.

Continuing with Rogue Galaxy. He pointed out that the US/European boxes

http://image.com.com/gamespot/images/bigboxshots/0/929240_68855_front.jpg (below)

and the japanese box:

http://www.ncsxshop.com/images/products/large/1205/rogue_galaxy.jpg (below)

Which are surprisingly very similar.

Some Concept art was shown, tracing the lead character from early stages to the finished retail version. The original was deamed “too childish” and too much for a domestic japanese market, one was too feminine (classic issue with Japanese RPG’s and the final one, which looks too much like a castlevania character in my opinion. I believe he was showing us this slide to show the fact that it’s better to try an deal with an “all” audience before you even get around to making the game. A trade off would be that it’s stil too much like “other region” for whichever market you are trying to make it for.

Everybody’s golf was next. This one also has different names in different regions. He traced the older versions of the game on ps1, He pointed out that the second version with a different box sold a 3x the amount of the first version. One could counter argue that brand awareness might just be better when the sequel comes out.

JAPANESE BOX
http://sakuraba.cocoebiz.com/discography/game/game-minnanogolf.jpg

http://image.com.com/gamespot/images/bigboxshots/4/197574_16034_front.jpg
US BOX

http://www.vgmuseum.com/scans/psx/hotshots.jpg

http://www.vgmuseum.com/scans/psx/02/hotshots2.jpg

with 5 – the ps3 version:

http://aspergers.dasaku.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/everybodys-golf-world-tour.jpg

http://www.ncsx.com/2007/072307/Thursday/minna_golf5_ps3.jpg
He pointed out that the (ps3) versions are pretty much identical and the players can use whichever characters that they want. There are various (stereotyped) characters from countries around the world and it’s up to the player as to which one they identify with most. Via payable downloadable content, additional characters can be obtained, Toro (the sony mascot), Kratos (god of war) and there are other high level characters (the female front end character) available also.

One thing that stuck in my mind was that he mentioned that this didn’t work. I found that this was almost unbelieveable, as I thought that for the PS3 version worked the best and you could make it as western/eastern as you wanted just by changing the character. The golf game isn’t affected.

He pointed out that he felt that user character creation would help avoid localized characters and potentially that would be the way forward. We have seen this in RPG’s, just being able to  change the name makes the player feel that they are getting closer to the character, so yes if a player can change every character they will meet more than once or join their team, then customization might be the key here. I am looking forward to seeing how this will work out in
their next game.