Something pretty weird just happened. A game got leaked by MENA gaming outlets because it doesn’t support Arabic. Yes, really.
A review copy of Bandai Namco Entertainment Europe’s “The Blood of Dawnwalker” was shared with an AI translation team running a game localization subscription service.
For 10$ a month, you get access to FLTAH’s kernel-level modification software, in which mystery ‘trust me bro’ code is injected into your system as the program patches AI-translated strings into the supported games while you play.
How did people figure this out?
Well, early access wasn’t quite enough for these guys. So they went on Twitter to promote day -17 localization exclusively for subscribers with a full gallery of in-game screenshots.
For good measure, they also kindly shared their personal opinion on whether the game is worth buying or pirating when someone asked.
And no, ‘day -17’ is no hyperbole. The full script is already available on their paid subscription a whole two weeks before launch. Gotta be a new record.
But this comes as no surprise.
Just last year, Silent Hill F was also leaked to the for-profit, AI-first fan translation group “Play in Arabic” (now rebranded as a ‘professional localization studio’) to produce a day-one translation.
But even that followed more ‘low-key’ but still obvious leaks to AI fan-translation groups, like Metal Gear Solid Delta, Split Fiction, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, and more—just from 2025.
The reason this keeps happening is twofold.
The first being that MENA content creators aren’t magically advanced at English. In fact, statistically, the better half of them is average at best. The lack of an Arabic localization is a problem they don’t intend to solve by getting better.
The second being that content creators, as the name implies, need to create content. Translating clips from every new release for their audience is just too much work when they can leak a review copy and get early access to an Arabic version to create their content with, skipping all the hassle.
Unlike the lukewarm reactions to the first few cases, players seem to care more than usual about this one.
That’s because Dawnwalker is one of the most anticipated titles in the region this year and the subject of multiple failed localization campaigns.
Multiple content creators came out and said that the publisher is frantically asking, “At the very least, if any of you have a contact at the AI translation team, please tell them to take the tweet down”.
Which eventually did happen. But a little too late.
The goody two shoes takeaway from cases like these tends to be ‘we should be more responsible’, but I disagree.
This is the result of pure demand and supply economics at play.
Give people localizations and they’ll stop buying dogshit AI slop. Give content creators localizations and they’ll stop leaking your games to get them elsewhere.
It’s that simple.
By Seif Chaib.
Originally posted on Linkedin.