Sander said:
Because Silver Style is totally a Polish company.
No, IIRC it's a German company. Which explains why it was released in Germany as well. Your point being?
The Anglophone market also includes the Scandinavian countries, Belgium, the Netherlands, hell, most of Western Europe and all of the commonwealth nations, as well as partly Germany and Poland, which all in all makes up for the vast, vast majority of the entire game market.
Nyet. It includes fractions of those markets, but it doesn't equal their sum. Also, these are still *seperate* markets from a distribution point of view.
If the EU was a single market from a distribution, service and marketing POV, why would most US MMORPGs whine about having to provide local servers (even if only for the three major languages) AND service (distributed by country, mostly).
Now, standard business practice says: find a niche. That niche is the post-apocalyptic market for The Fall. They limited their niche to the German market as well. Note the word niche, this means that you do NOT market to the largest possible demographic when it comes to taste, but to a market where you have a decent chance of success.
Now, they wanted to expand this niche. The easiest way to do this is export the game. They went this route, but for some reason chose to expand to the relatively small Polish market, instead of the Anglophone market, which is vastly bigger. This does not mean catering to the gaming tastes of people, it merely means making the game available to a greater amount of people.
They chose a smaller step first. I somehow have the suspicion they had a reason to believe that the Polish market somehow had an interest in their niche, but I'm hardly the person to talk to about that decision. Ask Silver Style instead.
Had they chosen the UK and Ireland, going world-wide (by targetting Australia, other Commonwealth countries and the US and Canada next) would have been easier, as it would have required less localisation of the game content, true.
But chosing the UK instead of Poland is not much of a blunder if you expect the demand in Poland to be higher or have other reasons to expect the Polish release to be safer.
I was talking about a translation. This is different from distribution.
Distribution comes into play later, obviously, but this is merely the same process for the English market as it is for the Polish market, only on a bigger scale.
Yes, but every new region requires its own distribution channels. With a major Producer these might already exist, but it's still more expensive the more markets you include.
I doubt they held the distribution back because of the translation. I'd rather expect them to have held back the release because of the distribution and thus decided to delay the translation.
They probably had problems on the distribution level (e.g. financing and cost/benefit calculations). Why invest money in something if it might not even happen?
Dragging those markets in is about as relevant as dragging the Swahili market in. They're not part of the English market, but the English market is obviously bigger than either of those markets.
On a distribution level, there is no "English market", that's what I'm saying. It's a meta-market spanning several demographics and countries. The demographics you can target with an English language version in a non-Anglophone country are pretty irrelevantly small, THAT's what I'm trying to get accross.
Which is why there are, *gasp*, translators. The developers are not the translators. They weren't in the case of the Polish version either.
Sorry. I misread your post as saying that people should produce the English version first and then localise it to their own countries, which was why I got started about the whole "local market" thing too.
Here being the forum, obviously.
Which does, obviously, not realistically represent the markets for the respective countries, does it?
That's what I meant with the irrelevantly small demographics. The kind that would play imported English versions rather than their local releases.
Unless you were only trying to point out that a German release isn't useful for the international market, which would mean my comment on developing for a foreign market first wasn't as pointless as I just said.
Wrong, obviously. The language is mainly a Germanic language.
Just that you can decipher it because it's a related language doesn't mean you actually speak the language. But unlike German, most people learn English in school or otherwise acquire a working knowledge of it.
I'd bet most people on this forum DIDN'T have German in school (I don't know what it's like in the Netherlands, but from my experience most Dutch do not have a "school level" knowledge of German, so I assume it's true for the Netherlands as well).
Right, obviously.
When asked, most Dutchmen wouldn't want dubs for anything. Subtitles are actually less intrusive and more realistic. Mainly because the lips actually move correctly, and you don't hear the same three people dubbing every bloody tv-series.
They are not used to good dubs and dubs are not the norm there either. Compare that with Germany where most people think "WTF?" when they see a subbed movie in a foreign language and mostly don't fully comprehend realistic spoken English (not saying they don't understand spoken English, but most of them don't even understand the gist of the English songs they hear on the radio).
I.e. the Dutch people are not representative if you talk about dubs in general.
Because I didn't comment on them at all? Gee, thanks for your insightful and well-founded commentary.
Because you ignored them and argued about the sequence of releases being retarded based on the language demographics alone.
You can't just start distributing everywhere because everyone happens to understand the language. You still need seperate distributional channels.
If two seperate regions share the same language, that only makes it easier because you can re-use more of the existing work, but it doesn't magically let you cover the market too.
Because stores are irrelevant? Eh?
But distributing isn't that hard. It's what, gee, distributors and publishers do.
And apparently their publisher sucks.
No, (physical) stores are currently not irrelevant. WTF are you replying to anyway? That's what I referred to as "traditional distribution". And traditional distribution requires having local publishers.
And guess what, most major publishers suck, so the publisher that doesn't suck might not have the capabilities to easily distribute the game in the country you eventually chose to expand to and require a contractor.
It's what many UK game developers bump into.
Look, Ashmo, tapping the English market isn't that hard if you have a decent publisher. The localisation besides the translation is rather minimal (if you want to take along the Dutch-lingual and Scandinavian markets as well, they'll translate the booklet and box as well). Then all that is left is actual distribution, which, again, isn't that hard. It costs money, but getting the money out of distribution and localisation for a single market isn't that hard if the market is as large as the English market.
You're again talking of "the English market", which is merely of philosophical interest. The only largest English market is the US, and they're not even in the EU, so they require quite a bit of special treatment.
Also, you need to comply with local legislation, which means running the game through the rating processes in every country you intend to distribute it in and little things like that.
As you already said: apparently their publisher sucks. I.e. apparently they somehow didn't have the capabilities to publish the game in the English market before now and somehow their publisher figured Poland is the easier choice.
Okay, I'll try this again: this is not the re-development of an entire game. It's a translation. You take words, and translate them to a new language, maintaining context.
Also, there are at least two examples that prove it can be done well: Gothic and Gothic 2. Both German to English translations and distributions.
Read what I said. I misread you as asking developers to develop for the foreign market (i.e. one of the Anglophone markets) first and then for the local one.
Sorry for the confusion, but my original point remains. It's not neccessarily the smartest thing to head for
a English market first. I don't know what their reasons were, or how valid they were, but it wasn't a dumb choice by default.
THAT's what I called Anglocentrism.
That said, most German games tend not to do particularily well outside Germany and a few other markets (notably NOT the English ones), so they might have been biased by that, although that would indeed not neccessarily be particularily smart.
Also, Gothic and Gothic 2 are notable exceptions, but The Settlers 2, for example, followed this pattern rather nicely.
Somehow most non-Germans do not like German strategy/eco-sim games -- which are a niche market even within Germany to start with.
I'd wager that a post-nuclear German strategy game (or RPG for that matter) might be expected to show a similar pattern. Notably, no-one seems to be aware of Burntime, or its developers -- Max Design -- in general (granted, it was Austrian and it was published in an era when most people thought of all computer owners as nerds, but it was released internationally).
Graphics are nice (very good Textures)(7/10) Dialogs and Story are rather medicore (5/10) music is good (8/10) and Gameplay is really great, it's really hard to stop playing it, i don't know why, really 
