Considering that almost 1.4 billion people live in China, and video games are very popular, very few titles bother to have full mandarin Chinese translations. (OK, I know…because piracy is rife and technically games consoles are illegal)
To date I’ve only found 2: Starcraft 2 and Deus EX. And the latter is not the whole game, just some of the NPC dialog when you’re in Shanghai.
Any others? The ideal would be an open world game like Skyrim.
I know it seems like it should be a Bing-able question, but I’m coming up empty.
Sure. Well I’ll start by saying the situation has got more complicated in recent years but it’s like this:
Up until a couple of years ago the sale of all games consoles, and PC games was banned in China. Of course there was a huge black market, but you couldn’t find games in department stores or the big internet shops.
So of course game developers wouldn’t bother to translate into Chinese when the Chinese government would see that as trying to flout the law, and the black market sellers were largely selling chipped consoles and copied games anyway.
However the government was slow to react to online and smart phone games. So these were never really blocked. Online games however usually require that you register with your Chinese ID.
In recent years the rules have been relaxed. Some (not all) games and consoles can be legally sold, and there are some special trial trade areas where basically everything can be bought and sold but you have to physically go there.
Still there’s enough nonPRC or nonROC Chinese around the Pacific Rim to form several large nations, I could have thought the devs could simply say the games were meant for that market.
Yes, it’s interesting in some cases where a game has been translated into many languages including, say, Polish or Italian, but not languages with a potentially much bigger market, even allowing for all the piracy. Apart from Japanese it’s rare for games to have any Asian language translations.
I think this part we can put down to (understandable) market failure. In the past it was not trivial to set up distribution to asian countries and the legalities of it made it too complex for it to be worth considering.
Nowadays with digital distribution, the equation has changed but it still takes time for the market to react. Starcraft 2 of course sold well in China…I wonder if publishers have taken note.
Steam has search functionality that allows you to filter by language. A search for Simplified and Traditional Chinese reveals lots of options, including major titles.
Turns out that this is another of those questions that only served to show how old and out of touch I am.
In fact there are a ton of Chinese MMORPGs, and they seem pretty high quality (although many apparently nag you to buy stuff).
I’ve opted to try out Revelation online (天谕), because it seemed like one that had a lot of chinese voice acting.
As for games with “Asian languages” aside from Japanese and Chinese, I imagine there are many games in Korean as well. That country is famous for MMORPGs and some very popular ones with international success come from there (the Lineage series, Black Desert Online, TERA Online, etc.).