How Amazon Games supports its external publishing partners

amazongames.com:

On Feb. 22 we announced the exciting news that Amazon Games will bring NCSOFT’s eagerly anticipated upcoming massively multiplayer online role-playing game Throne and Liberty to North America, South America, Europe, and Japan.

There’s much that goes into the publishing side of games that may not be so obvious at first glance. We’re proud of the success we saw after publishing Lost Ark and we also learned a lot throughout that process, so we wanted to share more insight about some of the key areas in which we contribute to these publishing partnerships.

It’s well established that translation is a massive undertaking when launching a game globally. Perhaps less obvious is the additional work involved in localizing the content as well. It’s more than simply translating every word of a game’s text (which totaled more than 3 million English words in the case of Lost Ark ) into each of the supported languages. A lot of context can be lost in translation, or the source copy may include regional references that are taken for granted in some countries but not understood in others. So our team works diligently to contextualize this content for each of the regions in which we publish a game while doing our best to maintain the original spirit and vision of the developer. We’re also responsible for sourcing regional voice-acting talent to record localized dialog and then working with the developer to rework cutscenes, lip synching and character models as required on a regional basis.

This entire process also creates new, cascading challenges along the way, such as text no longer fitting into pre-built dialog boxes, menus and other UI elements. We work closely with the developer to identify these issues and come up with solutions.