The importance of free-to-play localisation

In the egaming industry, sowing the seeds of global success is best achieved by coupling international ambition to local utility. After all, while some trends are universal, language, taste and gaming proclivities can be culturally contingent. For example, English is undeniably the lingua franca of the world. Yet, according to international translation agency Asian Absolute, only 27% of the consumer gaming market is English-speaking.

The challenge

The relevance of these factors in the gaming industry goes straight to the core of user interfaces and translations. English-language “string” lengths, line heights, glyphs, fonts and assorted fun stuff may sound like the red marks of a pedantic teacher. However, it can all add up to commercial oblivion for your UI experience, not to mention its underlying platform.

Say what you want about the English language but its depth of expressions and irregularities allow for brevity where most others do not. Layouts, which are invariably designed in English with all its special assumptions, can be instantly sent out of kilter or misaligned post-translation, and the UI quickly falls off a cliff. Netflix, who obviously enjoy more extensive data sets in this area, have reported myriad UI layout issues during localization testing, with translated text up to 40% longer than its English forerunner. This is apparently most prevalent in languages such as German, Hebrew, Polish, Finnish, and Portuguese.

As a result, games-providers must take a deeper dive into the latest localisation techniques if they are to successfully make their game or app connect with the broadest possible audience. Naturally, though, this means far more than just ensuring the words on any given screen are correctly translated, or appear in the most apposite and concise format.

That said, this isn’t to say that we’ve been without our localisation challenges at SportCaller, where we have been at the forefront of the free-to-play (FTP) sporting game movement for years. Indeed, in the space of the past year alone, our platform has morphed from offering English-only games to supporting players in over 30 different countries via 11 languages. So, as the UI goalposts constantly shift for effectively engaging and entertaining players from a wide variety of sports interests and gaming inclinations, you need to be able to match those strides in lockstep.

The solution

Which is why the technical side – i.e. providing the most flexible, intuitive and nimble platform – is the most crucial component in resolving these issues pre-rollout at the design stage. Just take the rising bar of regulation worldwide. From GDPR to post-PASPA, and through other soon-to-regulate milestone opportunities like India, specific challenges of legal compliance can become uniquely partitioned to each region or even state. Consequently, FTPs require more flexibility to become universally compliant.

An obvious example is provided by Asia’s huge population, whose innate diversity demands that egaming operators and suppliers step up to no shortage of gift-or-a-curse scenarios. Indeed, Asia’s fragmentation for game design and regional specificities (be they the result of player preference or legislative requirements) only magnifies the importance of supplying a precise game UI at every turn, and in every country.

To which end, the key is to develop geo-location tools which let operator partners geo-target and percolate between varying territories with ease. You must also have the know-how to limit and confine activity to over 18s, or over 21s (in the case of the U.S). In turn, this also allows the FTP game itself to better connect different demographics, elevating FTPs outside the realm of the sports bettor to a far broader consumer base of everyday players.

The future

At the end of the day, the aim for any FTP supplier is to make it as easy as possible for your respective partners’ integration teams to deploy your platform. After all, no matter how good your gameplay or playability is for boosting activity, acquisition and retention, those abilities are all for nothing if a laborious assimilation process, or any of the aforementioned localisation issues, hampers integration.

Small wonder, then, that a frictionless-is-fastest mentality underpins all the work of our UI developers. From layout to localisation, under the hood, you must precisely set the technical dials of your solution in order that you might improve speed to market and minimise logistical operational costs.

So, when it comes to localisation, feel free to dream internationally. But always remember to act locally. If only to truly understand the market, the product and what the native operators and customers need. That way, wherever you stick on the map, you’ll never run the risk of walking off it into uncharted territory.

Niall King is chief technical officer at SportCaller, keeping its free-to-play games at the forefront of acquisition at retention techniques in an evolving regulatory space