This is a summary of the research project completed by All Correct staff in April-June 2015 and presented at Game QA & Localisation Forum Barcelona. Do players skip a lot of text when playing? Do they prefer voiceovers over subtitles? What’s their attitude to swear-words and memes? What localization errors are most irritating to the gamers? Can they name the best and worst voice overs? Are female players more sensitive to gender-neutral address? A survey published on a major gaming portal contained several dozen structured questions, and gathered a massive 1,800+responses. We also applied qualitative methods to a narrower focus group for deeper insights.

1. What Russian players think makes
a good localization: research report
Anastasia Kosareva, Demid Tishin
Barcelona 2015

2. Session outline
Presentation
• Research background, goals and design
• Overview of survey respondents
• Summary of responses
• Focus group: hypotheses and key findings
• Summary
• Lessons learned
• Future steps
Discussion
• Application scenarios

3. Why research?
• Establish communication with end-users
• Identify bottlenecks in localization production
• Improve workflows on dev side and loc side
• Improve image of localization vendors in
gaming community

4. Objectives
• Publish research summary for all stakeholders
as widely as possible
• Involve publishers in discussion
• Update own work instructions and loc
specification defaults

5. Design
• Open survey on a major gaming portal
– www.riotpixels.ru
– 1800+ responses
– 95% responses gathered over 1 week
• Representative focus-group
– 100 respondents matching publicly
available player distribution reports
(gender, age and platforms)
– Respondents with more detailed answers
were preferred
– Inductive analysis
– Hypotheses testing

6. The respondents

9. Do they care?

15. Localization depth

19. Voiceover

23. RU voiceovers they love

24. Best voiceovers, 100 respondents

25. RU voiceovers they hate

26. Worst voiceovers, 100 respondents

27. And the winners are…

28. Best voiceovers (net score) 100 respondents

29. Text localization – fluency

36. Text localization – accuracy

43. Text localization – design

46. Fan or official?

48. Focus group research

50. Pains

51. Mentions of localization issues, 100 respondents

54. Gains

56. Mentions of localization merits, 100 respondents

57. Some hypotheses we checked
• Gamers with a higher proficiency in English prefer to play games
in their original language – confirmed
• Women are more sensitive to gender-neutral address – not
confirmed: both men and women dislike it
• Mobile gamers are more tolerant of errors than PC gamers –
controversial: close-type answers show that language fluency is
equally important in the two groups, but mobile gamers were 4
times less active naming loc issues in open answers. Could be
explained by less text in mobile games
• Hardcore gamers are more tolerant of gaming slang – confirmed
• RPG gamers are less sensitive to abbreviations – not confirmed.
Most sensitive: simulation / tycoon players, least sensitive –
arcade & puzzle players
• Hardcore gamers are less sensitive to memes – the opposite
correlation shows. Could be explained by bigger immersion of
hardcore gamers

58. Summary
• Good localization is important for UX, but it’s not the
decisive factor in player's loyalty
• Voiceover is appreciated – provided there’s a language
switch, and voices sound natural and match characters
• Subtitles are crucial, and should match video
• The majority of Russian players read all in-game text
• Mistranslations are common and irritating
• Bad fonts, truncations, abbreviations and gender-neutral
address all spoil UX
• Russian players pay attention to text fluency, spelling and
grammar
• Realisitic speech registers are crucial for UX
• Swearings are generally appreciated, while gaming slang
and memes are a thumbs-down
• Players lack means to give feedback on loc
dtishin@allcorrectgames.com

59. Lessons learned
• There’s little or no correlation between age /
gender / language proficiency and core
responses
• Focus on correlations between platforms /
genres / time spent on gaming and
localization preferences instead
• Double-check questions for clarity
• Use rubrics instead of open-type questions
• Sampling – use multiple / general survey
platforms (Facebook?)
dtishin@allcorrectgames.com

60. Future steps
 Involve publishers in discussion
• Create a mailing list
• Distribute research summary for all
stakeholders as widely as possible July 2015
• Update own work instructions and loc
specification defaults
• Initiate a wider-scale research
• Project facilitation meeting:
Las Vegas QA & Loc Forum Dec 2015
• Prepare and circulate a best practices paper
dtishin@allcorrectgames.com

61. What can we change?
• Give loc vendors more time
• Give loc vendors more context (builds, please :)
• Enable efficient communication between dev and
loc
• Develop common requirements to localization
quality experts
• Dev: go deep with loc engineering – language
switch, fonts, text resizing and grammatical
tokens
• Loop back to loc vendor for overall check before
release
dtishin@allcorrectgames.com