Localizing games for an audience of another country is a laborious and difficult process that involves not only translating the interface, but also adapting the entire gaming environment to the culture of players with a different mentality. There are not so many localization companies taking on this work on the market.
Localization companies
There are companies whose task is reduced exclusively to the localization and support of computer games - they do not create their own product, but they have a variety of projects of foreign companies on their account. These localizers include, for example, Innova Systems, aka “Innova”, the author of translations for Lineage 2, Aion, RF Online and many other online multiplayers. They have partnered with Sony's game development division, Korea's NCsoft, Creative, and other big names in the gaming industry. Their translations are considered to be of the highest quality on the market.
Another localizer is 1C, which bought the Buka company, which was well known to all gamers of that period about six years ago. Recently, 1C has become known as a translator of many excellent projects, both on its own and in collaboration with other localizers - Akella, Nival and Softklab-NSK. On their account Doom 3, "Corsairs 2" and 3, Gothic, three games of the GTA series, two parts of the game Max Payne and the new MMORPG Royal Quest.
The Nival company, although it appeared on the computer games market for a long time, initially positioned itself only as a developer and was called Nival Interactive. The fame of localizers came to her after the translation of Perfect World, 7 Souls and Forsaken World - large Asian MMORPG projects, each of which gathered thousands of users. This happened after the company was completely bought out by the Mail.ru holding in 2010.
Game localization by developers
Some companies, especially large ones, prefer not to give localization to the wrong hands and monitor the quality of adaptation on their own. This is the case, for example, with Blizzard, the developer of the Warcraft universe and the world's most popular online game World of Warcraft, which has released several large online projects over the past few years with full localization and adaptation for the Russian audience. The developers of Electronic Arts adhere to the same strategy, having created the Russian division of the company called EA Russia solely to localize their products for the Russian market.
The announcement of the Russian localization of its PS4 games was also made by Ubisoft - at the moment, a list of nine games has been announced that are preparing to be released in Russian. It includes Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, Tom Clancy's The Division and Beyond Good & Evil 2.
