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Eldwood27 days ago(+5)

There are basically three reasons for non-Chinese people not prioritizing Chinese localization:

  1. On the technical level, the Chinese writing system is difficult to deal with because of the sheer number of different characters. It’s easy to find or make a small pixel font that supports the Latin alphabet, and not much harder to support Cyrillic, but Chinese fonts require huge numbers of characters, and the characters need to be relatively big to stay readable.
  2. On the legal level, it’s easy for an outsider to accidentally violate Chinese censorship laws, which can result in the game being blocked in China.
  3. On the economic level, the Chinese market is notoriously difficult to break into for outsiders. There are some major exceptions to this, but that’s all they are, exceptions. This affects even free indie games: why bother translating into Chinese if very few Chinese people are interested in the game?
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Maxy27 days ago(+1)

if your game wont appear at chinese official platforms, u will never be ban by chinese law, thats fake news.

it's not a exception, we even have some websites to recommand english games with chinese translations, and u can find some not famous games become famous in china cuz they made chinese translations. AND if ur games are not famous at all, only making chinese translation wont change anything, the point is game itself, and yeah with chinese translation.

check all true news on TikTok, i know eng people can find chinese true news ezly on Tiktok before

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Maxy27 days ago(+1)

Due to some complex words, I have to use a translator to communicate with you about the following sentences: You think the Chinese market cannot be entered, so you don't do Chinese translation, but the fact is that many people cannot successfully enter the Chinese market because they haven't done Chinese translation, which is the reason.

Moreover, the Chinese market is not only the Chinese Mainland market, but also the Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan and overseas Chinese. It is almost impossible for the game you mentioned to be prohibited by law, and as far as I know, only a few large-scale commercial games are prohibited because they are too bloody, violent or contain cult content. If your game is a normal leisure game or an ordinary competitive game, you don't need to worry about this at all, and the premise of all this is that your game is tried to be released on the official game platform in China (this is almost impossible for independent developers like you, because the platform will require you to have a Chinese citizen ID card to prove your identity as a developer)

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Maxy27 days ago

Modern game engines have already developed native Chinese font solutions, with no technical barriers. The Chinese pixel font you mentioned has long had mature solutions in many pixel games, such as Minecraft.

Moreover, foreign games with Simplified Chinese do not participate in domestic censorship in China. And in the situations where you mentioned being prohibited by law, the vast majority of cases of illegal bans are not rooted in Chinese translations.

And I think this is a business fact that everyone should be aware of: if you don't localize, it's basically equivalent to completely giving up on this market. This fact was not proposed by me, but by commercial studios that developed masterpieces such as The Witcher III and Cyberpunk 2077.

I believe that the core value of localized translation has never been to "make games explode overnight", but to steadily improve basic business data. If you are unwilling to do even the initial localization translation, how can you make Chinese people willing to play your game?

Moreover, having Chinese for free games will greatly enhance community activity, and active players are the core source of paid content in the future. To seize the Chinese market for similar games, local translation is almost necessary.

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Maxy27 days ago

And I also noticed an interesting point: some games are willing to do localization translation for dozens of small languages, but still unwilling to do localization translation for Chinese. If it is to make games popular and make money, shouldn't we do Chinese translation and enter the Chinese market?

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D-san17 days ago(+1)

You've just never dealt with the technical side of translation. To get Chinese working properly on the Ren'Py engine, you need a ton of dedicated styles for it. And that's just the start—I spent up to 4 days just tweaking the fonts so they wouldn't break the ENTIRE game, while Latin and Cyrillic don't need to be tweaked at all. 

And I'm not even mentioning the fact that the game sometimes uses custom fonts, which somehow have to be optimized and adapted for the Chinese fonts. 

Long story short, it all looks super easy and simple from the outside, but in practice, very few people are willing to spend that much time on it. Plus, let's not forget that Chinese is considered the HARDEST among popular languages. You can see the quality of machine translation yourself—it turns the game into one massive misunderstanding for a Chinese player. And indie devs DO NOT have the funds to hire proofreaders or pros. All we can hope for is that native speakers will offer to help out of the goodness of their hearts (like it happened with me and other devs).

Should I even mention that Chinese players are restricted by their financial systems? This means a project physically can't get funding from the Chinese audience (and if it can, it's only after a ton of fees and effort on the player's part).

Hope I shed some light on this and answered your question. Look at it from any angle, and the problems sometimes outweigh the practicality. So all hope rests on enthusiasts, and us devs just have to optimize the software so it doesn't break from hieroglyphs.

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Maxy17 days ago

yeah i never touch things about RenPy, when i say it, im thinking of Unity

Yes, a little, but still can, and thats ez to do if they know how to make it, there are many tutorial vids about it to tell u how to support and donate

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