This article has been authored in collaboration with Lisa Pak, strategic partnership manager at Wooga

本文是与 Wooga战略合作伙伴经理 Lisa Pak 合作撰写的

June’s Journey is a visually stunning hidden object game set in the 1920s that follows amateur detective June Parker as she solves mysteries around the world. Released by Wooga in October 2018, June’s Journey has seen steady growth since launch thanks to its vivid artwork, rich story and worldwide locations to explore. This depth of experience is central to Wooga’s philosophy, as expressed by Lisa Pak, Strategic Partnerships Manager — “at the heart of every game we make is a gripping narrative, with relatable characters that take our players on an adventure.”

《六月之旅》是一部1920年代视觉上令人惊叹的隐藏物体游戏，紧随业余侦探June Parker解决世界各地的奥秘之后。 由Wooga于2018年10月发布的《六月之旅》自发行以来一直稳步增长，这要归功于其生动的艺术品，丰富的故事情节和可探索的全球地点。 战略合作伙伴经理丽莎·帕克 ( Lisa Pak)表示，丰富的经验是Wooga理念的核心-“我们制作的每款游戏的核心都是令人着迷的叙事，相关角色使我们的玩家冒险。”

One area that needs special attention with a game that has such a focus on story and theme is localization — specifically the need to ensure that localized content captures the true spirit of the game and narrative details. This is particularly true for hidden object games, since players need to find specific classes of objects among the many items in the picture — possibly including decoys or intentionally challenging distinctions. In this context, the slightest mistranslation could render a level or even an entire game unplayable. This article explores how Wooga approached three key aspects of localization that are important for any developer seeking success in a foreign market: content localization, customer support and user acquisition.

专注于故事和主题的游戏需要特别关注的一个领域是本地化-特别是需要确保本地化的内容能够捕捉到游戏的真实精神和叙事细节。 这对于隐藏的物体游戏尤其如此，因为玩家需要在图片中的许多物品中找到特定类别的物体-可能包括诱饵或故意挑战性的区别。 在这种情况下，丝毫误译可能会导致关卡甚至整个游戏无法播放。 本文探讨了Wooga如何实现本地化的三个关键方面，这对于在国外市场寻求成功的任何开发人员都非常重要：内容本地化，客户支持和用户获取。

为什么日本和韩国以及如何在那里取得成功 (Why Japan and South Korea and how to succeed there)

The localization of June’s Journey began following a cost/benefit analysis that gave Wooga the data they needed to justify placing their focus on Japan and South Korea. Compared to other markets, these regions had a high potential for growth and impressive engagement among local users as well as a thriving mobile culture.

在进行成本/收益分析后，开始向6月的旅程进行本地化，该分析为Wooga提供了证明其将重点放在日本和韩国上所需的数据。 与其他市场相比，这些地区具有巨大的增长潜力，本地用户之间令人印象深刻的互动以及蓬勃发展的移动文化。

1. Content localization

1.内容本地化

When approaching the localization of the Play Store listing and game content itself, an important distinction was drawn between translation and transcreation. Learning from their experience with a previous title, ‘Pearl’s Peril’, rather than directly translating each word or even each sentence they adapted the message into a new language while maintaining the style and tone that was so important to the game’s initial success. This holistic approach that focused more on the overall impression ensures players won’t be put off by errors such as clunky grammar or a lack of informal language — for a game that puts such heavy emphasis on the story, this was particularly important.

在解决Play商店列表和游戏内容本身的本地化问题时，在翻译和转译之间做出了重要区分。 他们从以前的游戏名称“ Pearl's Peril ”中汲取经验，而不是直接翻译每个单词甚至每个句子，而是将其改编为新语言，同时保持了对于游戏初期成功至关重要的风格和语气。 这种更注重整体印象的整体方法可确保玩家不会因笨拙的语法或缺乏非正式语言等错误而退缩-对于一款非常注重故事情节的游戏而言，这一点尤其重要。

An example from June’s Journey involves transcreated Japanese text that literally means “I feel my chest pocket warm” — this would make no sense in English, but is a local idiomatic phrase that simply means “I have lots of money!”

“ 六月之旅”中的一个示例涉及转译的日语文本，其字面意思是“我感觉我的胸袋很温暖” –用英语来说这没有意义，但是是一个当地的惯用语，仅表示“我有很多钱！”

One often overlooked aspect of this process is the impact font choice can have as not all fonts include all the necessary characters for foreign languages. Seeing a character in your native language failing to display properly or displaying outside the text box is an alienating experience for the player as it needlessly gives the impression that the game is not designed for them and little effort has been made to cater for their time. As part of their successful push into new markets, Wooga took care to adjust fonts and formatting based on extensive testing in all the materials for June’s Journey, ensuring it was a pleasure to read in all languages.

此过程经常被忽视的一个方面是字体选择的影响，因为并非所有字体都包含外语的所有必需字符。 看到母语无法正常显示或在文本框外显示对于玩家来说是一种疏远的体验，因为这不必要地给人的印象是游戏不是为他们设计的，并且很少花时间来照顾他们。 作为他们成功进入新市场的一部分，Wooga会根据对June旅程的所有材料进行的广泛测试来调整字体和格式，以确保能够以所有语言阅读。

2. Customer support

2.客户支持

If someone in a foreign market encounters a problem with the game, your best case scenario is that they contact your customer support rather than simply immediately churning. This is a common pain point for many games as users will often churn if they feel the support service is not able to help them. To avoid this danger, Wooga established local support teams that could guarantee native-language support within 24 hours. Wooga also ensured their players had localized FAQs — allowing players in many cases to solve the problem themselves with expert, transcreated guidance and reducing the load on the live support desk.

如果在国外市场有人遇到游戏问题，则最好的情况是他们与您的客户支持联系，而不是立即搅拌。 对于许多游戏来说，这是一个常见的痛点，因为如果用户觉得支持服务无法帮助他们，他们往往会流连忘返。 为了避免这种危险，Wooga建立了本地支持团队，可以保证在24小时内提供母语支持。 Wooga还确保他们的玩家拥有本地化的FAQ(常见问题解答)，从而使玩家在许多情况下都能通过专家级的，自动创建的指导来解决问题，并减轻实时支持台的负担。

As Lisa Pak, Strategic Partnerships Manager puts it, this approach to native customer support was taken “to ensure a more authentic, natural and appealing tone.” This philosophy is reflective of the wider game: the user journey began with a transcreated store page with transcreated replies to reviews and proceeded through a fully transcreated game, so it makes sense for customer support to be handled the same way!

正如战略合作伙伴经理Lisa Pak所说，这种为本地客户提供支持的方法是“确保更真实，自然和有吸引力的基调”。 这种理念反映了更广泛的游戏：用户旅程始于创建的商店页面，其中包含创建的对评论的答复，然后进行完整的创建的游戏，因此以相同的方式处理客户支持是有意义的！

3. User Acquisition

3.用户获取

Running campaigns to acquire users in foreign markets can be intimidating given the potential for a mis-step to actually damage your title’s reputation in that region. The reality is that with the right approach it can be fairly easy, which is what Wooga found in relation to June’s Journey. Having already ensured that the game and community were region-friendly, Wooga did not need to fundamentally change their user acquisition strategy — they simply made their existing efforts mindful of the region.

考虑到采取错误措施实际上可能会损害您的产品在该地区声誉的潜力，因此开展竞选活动来吸引外国市场的用户可能会令人生畏。 现实情况是，采用正确的方法可能相当容易，这就是Wooga与June的旅程有关的发现。 Wooga已经确保游戏和社区对地区友好，因此无需从根本上改变他们的用户获取策略- 他们只需使现有努力关注该地区即可 。

They continued to run the same kinds of UA campaigns as before but with local insights and live adjustments as they began generating their own results, for example finding Youtube to be far more successful than in the US. Changes included targeting insights (check out Google Play’s insights into the Japanese and Korean markets), new creative assets that featured regional themes (such as Shiba Inus for Japan) and copy that used the style and phrasing of a natural speaker. Recent efforts from Wooga to engage with local agencies and networks within Japan and South Korea are examples of more developed approaches, but were far from essential to break into the market.

他们继续进行与以前相同类型的UA广告系列，但随着他们开始产生自己的结果时具有本地洞察力和实时调整，例如，发现YouTube比美国要成功得多。 更改内容包括定位洞察力(请查看Google Play对日本和韩国市场的洞察力)，具有地区性主题的新创意资产(例如日本的Shiba Inus)以及使用自然说话者风格和措辞的复制品。 Wooga最近与日本和韩国的本地代理机构和网络合作的努力是更发达的方法的例子，但要打入市场远非必不可少。

影响和结论 (Impact and conclusion)

Launching into new markets can give a massive boost to a studio as it multiplies your audience for relatively little effort. The success of a region-sensitive approach such as Wooga’s is easy to show. By ensuring their localization truly created a comfortable end-to-end experience for potential players, June’s Journey saw CPI reduction of 52% in Japan and 73% in Korea. These reductions still put the CPI at or near the CPI for a US audience, however engagement and monetization had also improved alongside. In Japan Wooga saw a D7 ARPDU around double that of the US alongside a 23% increase in D1 retention and 15% increase in D7 retention, quickly pushing Japan into their top markets. Korea’s D7 ARPDU is now equivalent to the US, and they have also seen engagement improve with a 9% and 8% jump in D1 and D7 retention respectively.

进入新市场可以极大地促进工作室的发展，因为它只需花费很少的精力就能使您的观众数量增加。 诸如Wooga's这样的区域敏感型方法的成功很容易证明。 通过确保他们的本地化真正为潜在玩家创造了舒适的端到端体验， June's Journey看到日本的CPI降低了52％，韩国的CPI降低了73％。 这些降低仍然使美国消费者的CPI处于或接近CPI，但是参与度和货币化也有所改善。 在日本，Wooga的D7 ARPDU大约是美国的两倍， D1保留率增加了23％，D7保留率增加了15％，从而Swift将日本推向了主要市场。 韩国的D7 ARPDU现在与美国相当，他们的交战也有所改善，D1和D7的保留率分别提高了9％和8％。

Economy metrics aside, local appreciation of their efforts can be seen in the fact that a staggering 96% of local players use the new localized version of the game. After only a few months, Wooga have seen Japan and South Korea go from being potential markets of interest to the verge of joining their top 5 markets globally — a massive success which other studios are keen to duplicate by taking a similar approach!

撇开经济指标，可以看出，他们对自己的努力表示赞赏，这是因为惊人的96％的本地玩家使用了新的本地化版本的游戏 。 短短几个月后，Wooga看到日本和韩国已从潜在的潜在市场转变为加入全球前5个市场的边缘-巨大的成功，其他制片厂也希望通过类似的方式来复制！

What do you think?

你怎么看？

Do you have thoughts on how to localize effectively? Let us know in the comments below or tweet using #AskPlayDev and we’ll reply from @GooglePlayDev, where we regularly share news and tips on how to be successful on Google Play.

您对如何有效地本地化有想法吗？ 在下面的评论中让我们知道，或使用#AskPlayDev进行鸣叫，我们将通过@GooglePlayDev进行回复，我们在其中定期分享有关如何在Google Play上取得成功的新闻和提示。