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Nearly 90% Of Developers Surveyed Say Premium Games Don't Need Microtransactions
(insider-gaming.com)
this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2024
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Yeah throw a separate underapprechiated and extremely exploited workforce under the under the bus instead, fucking asshole morons. How can you talk about "premium games" if the premium experience doesn't fucking involve the artistic touch of a writer in your own language actually translating it?
Just like how automated phone systems have replaced human operators... for the first half hour or so of most incoming calls anyway. Except those automated systems also burn the planet down a lot faster.
Not that I disagree with the sentiment, but big assumption that there are dedicated translators and not just some guy using Google.
Source: software dev whos made to support multiple languages but barely speaks one
Not really my assumption, and in either case it's bad when things get worse and have less accountability or capacity for adjustment for the better.
These are programmers, they think writing code is the highest form of writing and they couldn't be more wrong.
They were speakers attending some conference, so they'd be executives and PR people. Which does make the general disregard for microtransactions bit surprising, at least, because those are exactly the sort of people you'd expect to be all in for monetizing everything they possibly can.
The article says developers were surveyed. Those are programmers. I know from experience that Devcom has a lot of developers and programmers on it.
They hold a hammer and see everything else as a nail. Tale old as time.
I'm a big AI hater but there's some pretty old games out there that have never had a translation project started and likely never will. I'd rather have a half-assed machine translation than have to consult a GameFAQs guide to reference what the menus do.
The best solution is of course to pay people properly for localization especially if we're talking about developing a new game though. FFXIV wouldn't be the same without the localization team rewriting quest titles to make amusing references to Euroamerican pop culture. And AI will never have that kind of charm.
I'd have to ask how many acres of rainforest will need to burn for each page of that machine translation before I got excited about that. The treat printers are very electricity expensive.
That's true, I always forget about that part. You can do the same thing with Google Translate or Deepl or whatever already anyway if you can feed it the text. Which I think is less energy intensive since its not using the crazy AI models to do it?
Yeah. LLMs are a solution that is aggressively making problems with the promise to solve them.