First issue is free: https://loekvankooten.substack.com/p/one-firing-three-languages-three hashtag#gaming hashtag#investmentresearch hashtag#japan hashtag#china hashtag#korea

Meanwhile, Nexon's chairman promised zero layoffs at a Capital Markets Briefing in Tokyo, one day after winning Blizzard's Korean publishing contract by promising deeper human localization. The Western industry is cutting localization teams. The Asian industry is hiring them, and winning contracts because of it. I read Japanese, Chinese, and Korean gaming media every day. I've done this for 30 years. I just started writing about what I find. CJK Game Intel. Weekly.

Here's what you're not seeing: This week, the NPPA approved 130 domestic games in China. Only 3 imports made the cut. That's a 43:1 ratio, up from 24:1 last month. If your portfolio includes a publisher with "China expansion" on the roadmap, ask them about this number. If they can't answer, they don't have a China strategy. They have a China slide.

#gameloc #localization #gamedev #translation #chinese #indiegames #steam

Since August 2025, Steam shows review scores filtered by language. English players see their score. Chinese players see theirs. Most publishers I talk to have never checked their own game's score by language. Some of them are in for a surprise. I wrote a deep dive on what went wrong with Silksong's Chinese localization last year: https://www.loekalization.com/blog/blog/2025/09/05/silksongs-real-final-boss-the-translator-who-broke-his-nda-and-wrote-like-a-dead-poet/

Hollow Knight: Silksong right now: English reviews: 93% positive (152,592 reviews) Chinese reviews: 75% positive (95,153 reviews) Chinese players write 24% of all Silksong reviews, but 55% of all negative ones. At launch, the Chinese score was 38%. The translation was so archaic that players compared it to a period drama staged inside a Metroidvania. Seven months later, it recovered to 75%. It still has not caught up with the English score.

Always. For all soups. Forever. Three words for "if. " Three completely different brains behind them. We wrote a full guide using nothing but real game dialogue: Graveyard Keeper, Punch Club 2, Dustborn, Bloomtown. No textbook examples. 10-question quiz at the end. Try it: https://learn.japanology.nl/article/tara-ba-nara #Japanese #LearnJapanese #JLPT #JapaneseGrammar #Japanology #GameLocalization

スープが逃にげようとしているなら、まだ料理し終わってないってことだよ。 That's an actual line from a game we translated (The Whispered World). And the reason it uses なら instead of たら or ば tells you everything about how Japanese conditionals work. なら: the speaker SEES the soup escaping, assumes it's true, and draws a conclusion. Deductive reasoning. Change it to たら? Now you're saying "once the soup escapes, then. . . " Like you're waiting for it to happen. Change it to ば? Now it's a law of physics. Soup escapes = not done.