Guild Wars 2

Hi!

Translation in Languages like Italian?
Something in this type planned yet?

Probably not.

In theory, ANet could add support for other languages. However, there are enormous costs relative to adding any of them and ANet has to balance that against how many new customers they are likely to get.

The biggest costs would be the voice acting (10 new actors for each language, from two genders across five races, plus associated management etc. — and that’s just for the player character, never mind every other NPC). So let’s pretend that ANet and the community would be okay offering text localization without accompanying audio.

There are still significant costs to translating the entire game. Done poorly, it’s still a grueling and painstaking process that requires multiple people to take multiple passes at the word choices and phrasing, to ensure something close to consistency across the game, & to prevent common entendres and other types of confusion. Worse, this isn’t a one-time expense; it requires ongoing maintenance. Every skill change and new item, every new dialogue, and every typo fix needs to be translated.

Weigh that against the benefits: how many new players would ANet get for offering that language? Plenty of potential players already speak German, French, Spanish or English well enough to enjoy the game; adding a new language needs to attract those who don’t.

I don’t know how or where ANet gets its data to estimate the potential income for each language; I imagine they hire a company that specializes in researching such questions (or perhaps they rely on following other industry leaders). My guess is that there are only a tiny number of languages that come close to meeting the break-even point. (Notice that Korean isn’t supported, even though it’s the offical language in Seongnam, where NCSOFT is located.)

tl;dr adding languages isn’t free; ANet is unlikely to add more without a compelling business reason to do so.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

adding a new language needs to attract those who don’t.

Exact!
I’m italian and I’d really like to play this game in italian, since it’s my main language and i am pretty sure, that this would be really helpful to other italians to have the best approach with Guild Wars 2. Unfortunately, many people quit playing games because it is not translated into their native language.

Localization attracts many player. Sure!

But it’s not enough to say it would attract new people.

As Illconceived Was Na said localisation is expensive (Anet need to pay people to translate the game, and to translate every new release they make) so they need to be sure before they start that it will attract enough new people to buy the game to cover the cost of doing that, at least. Ideally it needs to make them a profit.

What they need is something to show them there are enough Italian speakers who cannot or will not play the game in Spanish, French, German or English but who would play the game in Italian so that if they all bought the game it would pay the salary of the people who translated it, and will continue to pay their salary in future so they can keep translating each new release.

I don’t know where you can get that kind of data, but I assume Anet have investigated it. I know some games are available in most European languages, but those are usually from very big studios (like Nintendo) and games without regular updates which only need to be translated once.

And even in case of some Nintendo games there will never be a german or french version, just saying.
Not complaining here but i will never get SMT IV in german, for example.
Would it open up the game for more players? Sure, but it’s more than unlikely.

Gw2 have sold million copies.
Money Anet has made them and it continues them to make

JosepITA.3780:

Gw2 have sold million copies.
Money Anet has made them and it continues them to make

That’s right and that’s without an Italian localization. How many more copies will they sell if they offer Italian? Compare that to (a) how much it costs to localize and (b) whether there are other languages that would bring in more players.

According to this website, Italian is barely in the top 20 of languages spoken as a native tongue (61 million people). Russian dwarfs that with 145 million. (There are even more Arabic and Hindi speakers.)

I’m sure many of your friends would be more likely to play if there were an Italian localization. Unfortunately, it’s unlikely that there are enough such Italian speakers to justify the costs.