Not an IT professional, but as a video gamer I can tell you that games which are made in non-English-speaking locales tend to suck if they're made for a locale that speaks a different language than their own. Some of them are atrocious, unapologetic, unholy shitbombs like a game that came out a while back called Restricted Area. I'd say it was eminently forgettable, except it was so bad it wasn't. I only played it once, for two hours, then uninstalled it and hid the box, and the memories of that shitbomb still haunt me. In addition to being an unholy union of Diablo II and Shadowrun, only sucking ten times worse than that sounds (seriously, a cyber-brain is a field-installable piece of equipment?!,) the voice acting was fucking godawful and the text made it pretty clear they settled for a babelfish translation.Sarevok wrote:I got a question for the IT professionals on the board. I am part a small company that makes j2me and symbian applications for smartphones. But my real passion is in video games. This year an opportunity has presented itself to put together a solid team of programmers, modellers and musicians to create something good. The problem is I am in Bangladesh. The work we get here through outsourcing is very different from game development. The overseas companies at US or Europe don't seem to consider outsourcing game development work here yet. Even though there are tons of good technical people here like in India. We had games made by eastern european companies that made tons of money. No such precedent exist yet for games developed in here. So if I approach a publisher how should I convince them it is a good idea to publish a game developed in Bangladesh ?
Then there's ones that are... Not so bad, like one called Exodus from the Earth. They actually hired decent, native English speaking voice actors and had the script checked over by someone who spoke the language fluently and could erase about 99.9% of the ridiculousness that occurs when you run something in one language through a software translator. It was still obvious in text descriptions of items, but it made for a quirky, kind of amusing game with decent gameplay and a fairly gripping (if tragic) story. But that is by far the exception, not the rule; mostly they're so bad you lament spending some money on them and forget them in a month's time. Some of them are good enough you're glad you own them because you might at some point want to play them again, and some... Well, some will leave you scarred. If you have a real passion for video games and want to produce them for the English-speaking market as opposed to the market you live in, I'd advise you to move to North America or the UK or Australia, in that order of desirability.
If, on the other hand, you're content to be the kind of person who works on an Uwe Boll film and freely admits to anyone who asks that the only way you sleep at night is the fact that you have no intention whatsoever of ever viewing the film you helped to make, then go ahead and try to get a video game outsourcing thing going on. You might manage to make some bucks before the latest in the line of evil video game developers picks up to the fact that these games are not selling and pull the plug.
