Evil Trout Posted:

Very early on in development I decided not to program Forumwarz in a way that would allow most of the text to be localized easily.

We thought that most of the humour and jokes wouldn’t translate well to other languages, and the extra work involved just wouldn’t be worth it. Also, back then Ruby on Rails didn’t have great support for it.

I don’t really regret it, to be honest. I know it limits our markets, but we are plenty busy already just supporting this one language.

As for advertising in non-US sites, I can see us doing that in the future. Right now we’re still figuring out what ads work and what ones don’t. We’re slowing buying more and more ads each week, and eventually we might try something that isn’t in English.

Answering the questions (IMO of course)

1- Most of the jokes CAN be translated into equally funny other jokes, IF it’s done by a person that dominates both english and the language they’re translating the stuff to.

2- I DO know it’s difficult to implement something like this, and I DO know time is scarce. But putting an effort into this is a sure way to attract more users. A game that is very supportive attracts a lot more people. It would also be supported by the community; so no translating work for CZ.

3- ADS in other languages attract people that use that language, but it doesn’t mean they speak English fluently. Quoting myself: “A game that is very supportive attracts a lot more people. It would also be supported by the community; so no translating work for CZ.”. This would make the ads much more attractive.

I answered it like this as I already found myself giving up of a game that had Portuguese ads but with Chinese as used language. I don’t really want this to happen to FWZ as this is a great game.

Also, I know, tl;dr. But meh, that’s my POV.