Being Local in a Global Industry : Game Localization from an Indie Game Development Perspective

Abstract: During recent years a rise of small, independent game developers have become a large part of the global game industry. These indie developers are often distributing their games using digital distribution with a self-publishing business model. While the possibilities to reach a large global audience are expanding with digital distribution, there are also challenges for the developers, where the work tasks previously handled by a publisher now has to be handled by the developers themselves. One such work task directly related to the globalness of the game industry is localization, which is the process of altering a product in such ways it can be used by consumers in a specific target market. The main objective of the thesis project is to understand how indie game developers are working with game localization as a part of the development process. In this case, "indie" refers to developers with limited resources in terms of financing and manpower, using a self-publishing business model. The research has partly been carried out through participatory field studies in close connection to indie game developers and development clusters in Sweden, China, and India. In addition to this, the technical aspects of game localization have been scrutinized through studies of localization support in commonly used game engines and game development tools.The results of the thesis show that game localization is an important development task due to the global nature of the game industry, but that its complexity often is underestimated by the developers. To reach a large player base, localization is a must and should be planned for early in the process. Further, the results show that game localization is less resource demanding ifusing a localization friendly production pipeline, and that the tools to set up such production pipelines are available in all major game engines