“I’d love to, but I don’t have a budget for localization”
That’s a phrase I hear all the time when pitching to indie devs. And they are right. I don’t try to convince anyone who says that to me. On the contrary, I’d probably do the same if I were in their shoes.
Indie devs usually start out of pure passion, an idea, and a dream. Then they get crushed by the business side of it:
“You need to make a deck like this to get approved by a publisher”
“You need at least 500 reviews on Steam”
“You need to market your game there”
“You need to make your game for the content creators”…
To make things worse, they get dozens of messages from people trying to sell them different services. Sometimes, when I really like the game, I’m one of them (sorry!):
“You need to localize your game to expand its reach”.
You need a sustainable business!
Although localization indeed greatly expands the reach of a game, what devs actually need is a sustainable business in the first place, and to think carefully about how much they can spend (if any) and what strategy makes sense for their own unique reality.
It’s also very important to leave the mental space necessary to create a great product because…
In the end, people still want to play great games.
I’m all for small teams, contained expenses and keeping costs under control. If your processes aren’t yet mature and you want to test the waters a bit before thinking about localizing your game, that’s absolutely fair. With the right marketing strategy, you can always localize it later.
The important thing to keep in mind is that localization offers one of the biggest ROI (Return on Investment), especially for games that don’t have much text on them. So devs should revisit the topic as soon as they can.
Also, it’s worth checking what you need to localize your game to make sure you’re ready for it.
Community translation and AI are the only two things I don’t recommend
Blindly throwing your text into an AI, or relying on community (volunteer) translations, is prone to backfiring. These heavily risk quality and might hurt a game/studio, like the AI prompt ‘slip’ on The Alters, by 11 bit studios.
AI with editing delivers clearly poorer quality than a good localization professional does, generating flat dialogue and predictable patterns. AI without editing is suicide.
And community translation means asking for non-professional people, with probably no linguistic background, to work for free for something you earn money from. You can’t (or shouldn’t) expect anything and can’t (or shouldn’t) complain.
If you don’t have the means, I always suggest not localizing. Leave your game in English. There’s absolutely no problem in that.