Reeves explains why Europe has to wait

via Eurogamer


SCEE boss David Reeves has said there is not enough incentive for developers to work on multiple language translations during development - explaining that's why us Europeans get games after the US.

Reeves told Eurogamer he would "love to go day and date with some titles" in the two continents, but said that was only really feasible in the UK. And he thinks you might call him bias if he did that.

"Well some developers would say they can do [translations during initial development]. Talk to Ted Price at Insomniac and he builds it in at the beginning. We're trying to educate all our developers to do that but it's something that's going to take a while," Reeves told Eurogamer.

"But even if you talk to Guerrilla, Namco, Square Enix, they all do it in English to begin with and then think about localisation later. You're absolutely right, we should do it at the beginning. But they look at it like, 'How much can I get for a Dutch version of the game?'

"With PlayStation Store we could probably go in the UK almost day and date. But then what are the Germans and the French going to say to me? That I'm Anglo-centric," added Reeves.

Yes and they may use other words, too.

Yes, this is sad. It always happened here, with most of the titles.

Not as if they release a game in "proper" English anyway! Always that US version with simplified spelling ;)

So the UK has to suffer delays and eventually get US language titles anyway just so that games developers don't get accused of anti-French/German/add your choice of country here.. bias? Hmmm!

Also they virtually never release games in the Finnish language, (except for kids and some limited EA sports titles), so it wouldn't make a whole lot of difference if they released the game at the same time as the US there too. I'm sure it's similar in all minority language areas but the delays are still there.

Often the voice work on "foreign"language titles just suck so much. The Italian in "Battlefield 2" is so flat and wooden.

At the end of the day quite poor effort.
MUST DO BETTER!