Localizing a narrative RPG into 12 languages
An indie studio launching a story-driven RPG globally
An indie studio with a heavily dialogue-driven RPG needed 12 simultaneous market launches with culturally specific humour, lore-locked terminology, and zero text-truncation bugs at ship. We ran the full programme — gamer-linguists, glossary, transcreation, in-context LQA on real builds — to a fixed Steam release date.
This case study is part of our Game Localization & Translation work — see how the same approach scales for other teams in our portfolio.
Challenge
What we walked into.
The studio's debut RPG had 180k words of branching dialogue, a custom in-world lexicon, and humour that leaned on regional references and wordplay. They were committed to a global Steam launch in 10 weeks, in 12 languages including Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, German, French, Spanish (LatAm), Brazilian Portuguese, and Arabic — with no margin for one-star reviews about broken localization, mistranslated jokes, or truncated UI in the first weekend.
What we did
The work, step by step.
Recruited native gamer-linguists — players of the genre in every target language — and ran calibration on a sample chapter before the main programme started
Built a glossary and style guide for the in-world lexicon, character names, factions, and lore terms — locked into the TMS so every linguist and reviewer worked from the same source of truth
Transcreated jokes, idioms, and culturally specific references rather than translating literally, so each market got humour that landed in its own voice
Localized UI, HUD, tutorials, and store-listing copy with character limits and rich-text tags visible in-context — placeholders like {playerName} and %d preserved exactly
Ran in-context LQA on the actual build per locale — playthroughs by native linguists logging UI truncation, mis-timed subtitles, and broken variables straight into the studio's issue tracker
Shipped continuous localization for post-launch patches and live-ops content drops on the studio's weekly release cadence
Results
What it shipped.
Outcomes measured against the brief we agreed up front, not vanity metrics.
- Languages shipped12
- Launch window10 weeks
- First-week intl. revenue share~40%
- Critical text bugs at launch0
- Review sentiment by regionConsistent
- Live-ops cadenceWeekly
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