“I hear you’re into sketching. We have an art contest coming up, wanna give curation a shot?” Sounds insane, right?
Except there’s an industry where that’s the norm. Welcome to game localization!
We’ve all had one of those days. You delivered a killer batch. A couple of weeks later, your client gets back to you.
Attached is a bloodstained QA sheet with 50 flagged strings. You’re now sweating bullets and questioning your mental faculties.
You start going through the sheet and quietly breathe a sigh of relief. The person flagging your work has no clue what they’re talking about.
The adrenaline starts fading, but your relief quickly turns into anger.
You now have to spend the next two hours explaining tone, register, and style to someone clearly out of their depth or out to prove themselves.
If there’s one universal gameloc experience, this is it.
But why do LSPs keep hiring any native off the street to be the final bastion of quality control? (Okay. We both know the main reason is money. But still.)
If they’re going to cut corners, why would they start at the last line of defense?
The secondary reason actually matters more. LSPs tend to scoff at the importance of polishing steps—they’re just expensive “fluff” for the much coveted “good enough”.
Following that logic, they front-load quality expectations (read: terrify their contractors into doing more than their role demands) on Translation and Proofreading, then cheap out or completely cut Editing and LQA from their process.
While that might look like a sound chain of thought to your average slave driver, anyone who’s ever worked in a creative role knows that the closer you are to release, the more senior the responsible role is for a reason.
Late stage QA needs an eye that can instantly tell a choice from a mistake. Someone experienced enough to analyze how things were approached before daring to make any calls.
Juniors rarely, if ever, get those calls consistently right. There are many paths into the industry. IMO, “Arbiter of quality” isn’t an entry-level one.
That’s how seasoned professionals end up playing counter feedback ping-pong with juniors who aren’t nearly qualified to critique their work.
That’s not normal, and we should stop treating it as normal.
By Seif Chaib.
Originally posted on Linkedin.