Crowdsourced Translations

Just a link to a good post by Adam Saltsman on Gamasutra about the experience of using crowd-sourcing to localize the popular iPhone game "Canabalt" into other languages.

Say what?

The only comment that I have is regarding Adam's post is that he mentions that "the introduction of new language options has had no measurable effect on sales." It should be noted that the game has very little text, I mean hardly any at all. And of that small amount of text, you seriously don't need to read any of it to be able to understand how to play it. The game is simply tapping on the screen to jump and doesn't really even have a user-interface. Also the game is over two years old. So, chances are that anybody, even non-English speaking people, who wanted to play it have probably already gotten it and hardly suffered at all for lack of localization.

I should also note that he does say that he thinks localization was a good idea and that it is probably a better idea to have localization in for for launch as international app stores may be more likely to feature the game. I'll add that being featured early on is one of the key features to having a successful mobile game.