"The Tales Team Simply Doesn't Have Enough Staff To Localize Every Game."

[ishiki]

TheKoreanGuy said:

One of the comments from the source:

"The thing is, even if someone other than Namdai handles the localisation, it is the game's development team that has to handle all the coding. I presume that is what Baba is referring to; they can't dedicate enough staff for that task in order to localise all the games. We've already had past examples of games (such as Ace Attorney Investigations 2 and Grand Knights History) that weren't localised due to development staff having moved on to other projects and thus being unavailable to code in localised text.

Technically, it is possible for someone else to do that job, but having to work with someone else's code is a programmer's worst nightmare (which is one of the reasons why fan translations take so long). Either way, it's not exactly a cost effective way of doing things and localisation studios don't usually have in-house programmers anyway."

While it does suck, the Vita IS underperforming in the West. If it was doing better, then Namco wouldn't really have much of an excuse. At least we are getting the flagship titles.

Theres issues with the code too. For instance, a lot of the american translators don't know how to code. And coders in USA don't often know how to speak japanese. Coders comments are likely in Japanese and use phrases even good translaters wouldn't know the exact meaning (or they don't leave comments at all :P). Coders also have tendencies some of which are bad even if they are speaking in the same language.

It would make sense for Namco Bandai to have a few extra people hired that work with the localization teams if giving out the source code is a big deal. And they expect to have a constant stream of games that need to be localized. And, make it a priority for the developers to make the code easy to insert different text for different countries localizations.

It's not black and white, but it's still a fairly flimsy excuse. If Carpe Fulgar can make some money doing Recettear, surely they can get a solution going even if they get a  low IRR which is not what you want when you're a big corp even if it "profits". It would appease fans and have a chance of growing the franchise which could lead to more profits down the road even if say the Vita localizations would net them a very low return.