Category: News

Altered Ventures has established a new $36 million venture capital fund to help indie game developers find their feet in emerging markets. 

Created in partnership with venture capital outfits Mountain Nazca and Streamline Media Group, Altered Ventures has offices in Silicon Valley, Mexico City, and Kuala Lumpur

The company is offering indie developers every single cent they need to both develop and publish their title in exchange for a revenue share from the project’s top-line. 

It currently has around $36 million to invest “in new development projects with a special focus on emerging markets.”

“Our investment thesis is fair to developers and very concrete, since we provide real cash-flow for development and marketing,” explained company co-founder, Mario Valle-Reyes, in a press release.

“It’s also very attractive to investors, because they don’t need to wait 5 to 8 years to see their returns as with traditional venture capital.”

Those interested can find out more, including out to get in touch with Altered Ventures, over on the company website.

The Korean Fair Trade Commission (FTC) has fined three video game companies, including heavy-hitters Nexon and Netmarble, for employing deceptive loot box practices. 

As reported by The Korea Herald, Nexon Korea — the publisher behind Lawbreakers, MapleStory, and the Korean version of Counter Strike — was hit with a $882,700 penalty and a $5,200 fine, the biggest among the three. 

Star Wars: Force Arena and Marvel: Future Fight publisher Netmarble was handed a $42,300 penalty and $14,100 fine, while Destiny Child creator NextFloor received a fine $4,700. 

All three have been asked to review and reform their monetization practices, with the Korean FTC specifically taking issue with way randomized loot crates are being promoted.

Indeed, the commission believes the offending outfits have been employing ads that display incorrect or misleading odds for loot crate drops.

For instance, it claims Nexon’s promotion campaign implied all loot crate drops had an even chance of dropping, when in reality the odds of receiving certain items were as low as 0.5 percent. Nexon has since spoken out against the decision, claiming the FTC misinterpreted the wording of its ad campaign. 

“In our puzzle event, we used the phrase ‘random provision’ to suggest the items would be provided at random, and that the odds of obtaining each puzzle piece were different,” said the company. “However, the FTC interpreted the phrase as suggesting equal odds. We plan to work on obtaining an additional review of this issue in the future.”

The Korean FTC isn’t the first organization to take issue with the use of loot boxes. Politicians and officials from around the world have been reviewing the “predatory” monetization method, with some calling for the controversial mechanic to be banned outright. 

Former Rockstar North chief and Grand Theft Auto V producer Leslie Benzies has suffered a setback in his lawsuit against Rockstar.

Benzies is currently suing Rockstar, its owner Take-Two, and studio co-founders Sam and Dan Houser for unpaid royalties in excess of $150 million after alleging he was unlawfully dismissed on April 1, 2015. 

He claims all three parties worked together to force him out of the company and terminate his royalty payments, which would’ve entitled him to an equal three-way split of profit sharing payments with the Housers. 

However, the New York Supreme Court has ruled that the profit sharing agreement Benzies signed doesn’t actually grant him a $150 million cut, as it “contains no language mandating equal payments.” 

Despite that, the court agrees that Benzies is entitled to “certain royalties” as part of his compensation, and that Rockstar did indeed breach its employment agreement based on salary and stock withheld. 

In short, that means Benzies could still be in line for a significant payout, given GTA V continues to bring home the bacon for Rockstar and Take-Two. 

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

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Localization Roundtable at GDC presented by the IGDA

This one hour session was hosted on Thursday morning (March 22nd) and we had about 60 attendees from all perspectives. 
The audience had localization managers, developers, translators, students, executives from localization companies and other attendees curious about localization and the session was moderated by Simone Crossignani and Laura Gutierrez (board members of the IGDA Game Localization SIG) and Seb Ohsan Berthelsen (Operations Manager at Square Enix). This was the only session about localization at GDC.

We tried a new format that had already been used in the previous GDC and at TGS which was to prepare macrotopics and questions and moderate the discussion between attendees and we asked the audience to vote on the macro topic which interested them the most.

The topics (in order of less to more interest were):

1. Practices

2. Audio

3. Technology

4. LQA

Practices

On the hard to find language pairs, an attendee pointed out that Indonesian to English for Board games is a rare pair, and then the conversation moved quickly towards evaluating the quality of translators and more specifically that of fan translations or crowdsourced translators.

A few developers said they are using fan translations because it’s cheaper and the people doing them are actually playing the game and it seems like they can be faster than translation agencies or professional translators (work over hours and on weekends), they get the feedback directly from players (as they are players themselves) however some of the issues pointed out were that they are not always reliable and the quality is also not necessarily there, therefore, another developer suggested using fans do the translation and professional revise it.

Another problem raised concerns the credits because it is uncertain who gets credit for the translation plus fans cannot handle high volumes or be too quick with bigger projects.

Audio

The question we asked was: what are the common grounds and differences between translating for the movie industry versus for the gaming industry?

Here are the similarities (in red) and the differences (in black)

Movie	Gaming
Dubbing with rhythm lip sync	Dubbing with rhythm lip sync
Context provided by the screen	Context given by the file
Excel File	Different formats
One audio track	Multiple files
Audio specialized translators	Gaming specialized translators (who know how to deal with technical implementations and understand the game)
English recording is done first for dubbing	English recording is done first for dubbing
Volume and time challenging	Volume and time challenging
Very slow process	Fast process (challenging deadlines)
Subtitling tools used	CAT tools used

Another issue raised regarding audio is the rising cost of voice talent.

With more and more developers creating licensed IPs, the voices of the movie characters dubbed into the certain market need to be used as per player preference. This raises the cost of the production of the game as the unions have higher prices than regular voice actors and it’s not a good practice to use another actor for the voice of a certain character.

Technology 

To the question if machine translation is being used and in which context the answer was yes, either a trained machine translation for in-game content or for the chats. The trained machine translation worked apparently well for some languages like FIGS but not too well with Asian languages. For the chat, it’s a solution that works really well according to the developer.

Machine learning was mentioned as an interesting solution for the future of the industry for context that is fairly simple but not for texts that require creativity or a deeper cultural context.

Regarding the tools, developers for PC and console expressed a preference for MemoQ whereas mobile developers talked about Memsource. Some developers have also created their own tools which allow an easier collaboration between developers and translators and to ease their own workflow (minimize the manual tasks). Some have also built their own API internally.  A recommended format for localization which would work both for translator and developers was XLIFF, and Excel was mentioned a few times for being the devil 

Localization Quality Assurance

The last point we discussed was how to integrate the player’s feedback into the localization workflow. It seems like gaming companies are making a bigger effort to have player support more integrated with localization which means that they can channel the player’s feedback about localization in an easier way to their provider. 

A Localization Manager from a big gaming company mentioned scouting the forums and the community actively for feedback as well as customer support tickets (tagged) to then analyze the feedback and select internally which one is valid and which one isn’t, then submit the changes, but besides the tagging the process still is manual.

The last point mentioned was that the Chinese market cares more about the quality than other markets as some players are used to translating games themselves.

Unfortunately, it seems like the timing was short and there could have been many more topics covered or explored as the community had a lot to say.
We also regret not having informed everyone in a clearer way about our Facebook Page so they could check out our cute new logo but mainly so they could follow us and participate in the discussions happening there. But we were overall very happy with the discussion and the sharing of practices and look forward to the next sessions! Hope a lot of you can make it there, we will inform you about them on our Facebook Page, our Blog and our Newsletter (subscribe here).

Game service provider Keywords has extended its audio service line by acquiring Cord and Laced from parent company Cutting Edge. 

Based in London, Cord offers a range of music focused branding and strategic consultive services. Laced is a music services outfit and record label specializing in video game scores and soundtracks, and has worked with the teams behind Ruiner, Halo Wars 2, and The Talos Principle. 

Keywords claims the deal will help its developers create games with better production values by giving them access to more music, and offering them consultancy on how to best implement it. 

Both Cord and Laced will continue to work wit Cutting Edge, and will be able to take advantage of the “extensive” catalog of media music rights owned by the company. 

“We are delighted that we will be able to add further value to our games clients through Laced’s specialism in licensing video game soundtracks for game companies and from music composers, and Cord’s expertise in music composition, rights management, music strategy consulting and audio branding,” said Keywords CEO Andrew Day. 

“We also see a clear opportunity to bring our localization, voice over and trailer creation capabilities to Cord’s broader client base of leading brands.”

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

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[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry ‘watcher’ Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend.

This week’s highlights include the current fate of Michel Ancel’s WiLD, a ‘state of eSports’ profile, Super Mario RPG archival interview goodness, & much more.

Well, we managed to get a ton of free GDC 2018 videos/presentations up on our GDC Vault website already, and now they’re starting to post on the GDC YouTube channel, so if you’d like to watch things like the NieR Automata talk, the making of Night In The Woods, the Splatoon design postmortem, or death & A Mortician’s Tale, you can go right ahead!

Oh, and am off to the Middle East on (non-video game related) business starting Sunday, so next weekend’s roundup may be a little truncated. We’ll seee!

Until next time,
– Simon, curator.]

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‘MLB The Show 18’ Dreams of Escape from Politics, And Damn, It’s Tempting (Rob Zacny / Waypoint – ARTICLE)
“Yet the stakes involving that outside world are there, even as The Show 18 conjures the fantasy of turning away from them. There are the Houston Astros winning the World Series, three months after a hurricane inundated a city synonymous with the petroleum industry.”

Muriel Tramis speaks about her career and the memory of Martinique (Phil Salvador / Obscuritory – ARTICLE)
“Muriel Tramis has a quiet but powerful legacy in gaming. As a designer and producer at French studio Coktel Vision starting in the late 80s, Tramis worked on about a dozen titles, like the puzzle series Gobliiins. But she may be known best for her socially charged games inspired by her family’s history on the Caribbean island Martinique, such as the colonial mystery game Méwilo and the incendiary slave rebellion game Freedom: Rebels in the Darkness.”

How video games turn teenagers into millionaires (Bryan Lufkin / BBC Bright Sparks – ARTICLE)
“Alex Balfanz is an 18-year-old student at Duke University in North Carolina. Every day he has lectures or seminars, followed by assignments. Like many students his age, he devotes a couple of hours per day, and many more at weekends, to video games. But he’s not just playing them – he’s making them. And making a lot of money doing it.”

Battletech arcades were decades ahead of their time (Lewis Packwood / GamesRadar – ARTICLE)
“Imagine an arcade filled with rows of rectangular pods. As you climb into one and slide the door shut, the only illumination in the otherwise black interior comes from a huge monitor and a cornucopia of blinking buttons. In front of you there’s a joystick and throttle, along with two foot pedals.”

Competitive sniping game SpyParty finally hitting Steam after eight years (Sam Machkovech / Ars Technica – ARTICLE)
“During last month’s Game Developer[s] Conference, longtime coder and designer Chris Hecker invited me to a game demo event with a tidy premise. “We are going to talk about three things,” he said as he began booting a six-year-old ThinkPad. I immediately laughed in response.”

What Happened to ‘WiLD,’ Michel Ancel’s Open World Game From 2014? (Patrick Klepek / Waypoint – ARTICLE)
“It’s been a little more than three years since Sony showed a trailer for WiLD, an ambitious open world survival game about—well, it wasn’t exactly clear, but it looked cool, and Beyond Good & Evil designer Michel Ancel was working it. For most people, you don’t need to hear much more than the name “Ancel” to get interested.”

Twitch Isn’t For Esports, It’s For Streamers (Will Partin / Kotaku Compete – ARTICLE)
“The current esports boom began in part because Twitch offered a suite of viewing metrics that made it much easier for esports teams and tournaments to negotiate with sponsors. In turn, the growth of esports normalized the practice of watching videogames.”

Know Your Inheritance (Soren Johnson / Designer Notes – ARTICLE)
“The most common thing to inherit, however, is game mechanics, usually from games in the same genre. For example, although Offworld Trading Company is an RTS, it’s notable for being one without units. However, we didn’t start there as we inherited from all the other RTSs before us – StarCraft, Age of Empires, etc.”

Steam in 2017 (Sergei Galyonkin / Medium – ARTICLE)
“By the end of 2017, Steam had 291M that have played at least one game at least once. 22% of them joined in 2017, so if you were worried that Steam only appeals to the aging core demographics — it’s not. We don’t know the age distribution for sure, Steam has been adding more and more new users every year and is far from slowing down.”

Iconoclasts (Spoilers) (Errant Signal / YouTube – VIDEO)
“Iconoclasts is a pretty neat game about shootin’ things and solvin’ puzzles and explorin’ stuff. It’s also a game about how roles and identities are built for you by society and how trying to conform or push back against those roles and identities can lead to suffering. Also: There are some really awesome boss fights. [SIMON’S NOTE: an excellent analysis video.]”

Indie game publishers are the new indie rock labels (Andrew Webster / The Verge – ARTICLE)
“Double Fine Presents is part of a steadily growing wave of boutique indie game publishers that are changing this dynamic. The trend started with Devolver Digital, a sort of punk-rock label for games, that published titles like Hotline Miami and Downwell, and provided developers help without taking a big cut of sales or trying to take ownership of their game.”

Helping players relate to the heroine of Night in the Woods (Gamasutra staff / Gamasutra – ARTICLE)
“A couple months ago, before Night in the Woods went on to take home the grand prize at the 2018 IGF awards, we spent an hour on Twitch chatting with co-creator Scott Benson about the game’s origins and development. More notably, we were able to really dig into into the design of the game’s feline protagonist, Mae, and what choices the Night in the Woods devs made to help players feel engrossed in her story. “

Exclusive Interview – Adam “Doseone” Drucker talks Score Wars and the Galaga Championship (Villordsutch / Flickering Myth – ARTICLE)
“This weekend the Internationally-renowned arts and entertainment group Meow Wolf is hosting Score Wars in Santa Fe.  Its first annual live and live-streamed video gaming event and at this major event, in amongst the gaming records set to be broken is the Galaga World Championship, with the three main contenders arriving from New Zealand, Australia and the USA.”

The Problems With Illegible Text In Video Games And Some Solutions To Fix Them (Gita Jackson / Kotaku – ARTICLE)
“Joe Humfrey, art and code director at game development studio Inkle, believes that the primary goal in designing text for video games is “making sure every word is effortless to read.” It turns out that making sure players can read and understand on-screen text is a more complicated task than you might think.”

Selected Stories from the Days of Laura Bow (Duncan Fyfe / Campo Santo Quarterly – ARTICLE)
“To prevent piracy, the 1992 floppy disk version of The Dagger of Amon Raforced players to answer trivia questions about the gods and goddesses of ancient Egypt. The solutions were printed in the game’s manual. However, Campo Santo’s Claire Hummel can solve that copy protection puzzle in five seconds without even owning a copy of the game, and that’s why she’s the art director for In the Valley of Gods. [SIMON’S NOTE: also in this Campo Santo Quarterly, an excellent West Of Loathing chat.]”

Making a civilization-scale crafting system for Jason Rohrer’s One Hour One Life (Alex Wiltshire / Gamasutra – ARTICLE)
“There’s no inventory in One Hour One Life. And yet this online survival game features grand total of 463 craftable objects. At least, that’s how many there are on the day this is being written. Developer Jason Rohrer is aiming to add another 9,500 over the next two years.”

Why We Spend Real Money on Fake Clothes in Free Games (Rebecca Jennings / Racked – ARTICLE)
“[Fortnite] is free. That is, if you’re cool with playing as the random avatar that the game assigns you, which, as previously mentioned, I am not. And clearly, I’m not alone: Tons of Fortnite players are paying real money to transform their avatars into astronauts, teddy bears, sentient Roman statues, or simply cooler-dressed versions of themselves.”

Far Cry 5 Review: Finally, A Video Game For Cowards (Joshua Rivera / GQ – ARTICLE)
“Every once in a while, a video game comes along that reminds you how thoroughly craven the medium can be. Far Cry 5, the latest in Ubisoft’s long-running franchise about cathartic first-person chaos across exotic locales in the grip of charismatic villains, wants to tell you that it’s swinging big. [SIMON’S NOTE: the ‘it’s controversial but it’s totally not about politics’ stance is tricky to perfect – but maybe Far Cry 5 did it?]”

Super Mario RPG – 1995 Developer Interviews (Family Computer Magazine / Shmuplations – ARTICLE)
“This October ’95 interview with Super Mario RPG director and then-Square employee Chihiro Fujioka sheds some light on the collaborative process and the division of duties between Square and Nintendo, with a particular focus on expressing the “essence of Mario” within the parameters of seemingly dissonant structures like isometric game maps and conventional RPG tropes.”

Taxonomy of Fishing Mini-games (Davide Aversa / Gamasutra Blogs – ARTICLE)
“Fishing is probably the most common mini-game in gaming history. Before I started working on this article,  I never realized how many games include fishing as mini-game. The list is huge. Fishing is everywhere. It seems that it is impossible to have a game without allowing the character to have a relaxing time fishing in a pond.”

Of Mice And Men (Simon Parkin / 1843 Magazine – ARTICLE)
“The player enclosure at the Overwatch World Cup looks like a cross between the green room of a talk-show and a slovenly student apartment. A shantytown of brushes and wet-wipes clutters a line of hair-and- make-up stations.”

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[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at tinyletter.com/vgdeepcuts – we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to vgdeepcuts@simoncarless.com. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra & an advisor to indie publisher No More Robots, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]