Hi,
I live in italy & I found "gog.com" searching for the game "pod".

I own games as rayman 1, 2 & 3 in retail, & was thinking about getting them over here as downloadable, when they will be in sale.
Only thing is that my retail copies are in italian & gog sells the games only in english.
It's not a great problen, since as you can see, I can read & speak english quite well.

There are also some games that I can find both here & on steam, but I'ld buy theme over there because the steam version can be downloaded in any language.

I was just wondering, why doesn't gog sell games in multiple languages ?
It would be a greate feature, that could also increase sells. What do you think ?

Most of it boils down to licensing and the fact that English is the most common language.

Seperate lanuages = seperate licenses.

England still has an empire? I think you've had one beer too many tonight, mate.

There used to be a GOGmix (a kind of user favorites group system previously in place) called Giochi in italiano by AaronAmoth. There was a list of all games with multilingual option where Italian was one of them.

The GOGmixes are basically defunct now, though.

There are multible reasons.

First: Often those translatations were not made in house and instead by contracted third parties. The contracted 3rd party may still hold some rights over the translation, the contract was poorly devised or the contract with 3rd party states that they should get some % of all copies sold that include that translation.

Second: More ofthen than not those separate translations were published by regional publisher and not the main publisher. Regional publisher often have exlusive right to publish the game in their region (and have publishing right only on that region) and often are the one commissioning the tranlation team.

All of these groups would have to be bought to same table and made to sing an agreement allowing GOG to distribute the ONE translation. All these parties would want piece of the pie and there's not much to share in 6/10 dollar game, is there? This would have to be repeated with all individual translations in order to get them on board.

Broblems would not stop with the signing of the agreement as GOG would have to aquire the translated game (as they often have to even now as devs/publishers no longer posses single copy of their game), test the game (they'd probably need to hire native speaker to do the testing) and apply their GOGfu to make it work (fixes etc deviced for english version may not work on translated version). GOG would also have to provide support for the translated version (again would mean hiring more staff).

So as you can see, not only is getting the deal to distribute convulated (it would get even more convulated if one of the parties in question no longer exist. GOG would have to hunt down who ever the right have fallen), the testing and making it work may get complicated as well.

This is why GOG usually aims to make deal with party that has most/all rights to what ever they got as it's faster, easier and most improtantly, less costly for them to do so (not to say even those are easy or fast. Making deal with EA took 2+ years and they still lack distribution rights for most EA game expansions).

Mandarin Chinese is actually spoken more than English :)

But only in China.



Don't some games have a language change capability in their options? Or are most of these too old? I think Rayman 2 at least let you change language to french.

Petrell, that was convincing. Thank you a lot & thanks also to all of you guys for answering me.

You're thinking native speakers. Native english together with second/third language is easily the most spoken in the world.

The Giochi in italiano gogmix gives a 404 error, but I can see and vote other gogmixes with no problem. And some of the users keep updating them.

On topic, those of us who want GOG to add more languages to games can vote for it: http://www.gog.com/en/wishlist/site/more_languages_for_games

Why does GOG not sell games in Chinese then?

Censorship.

We could make a list of that on the wiki. At lest searching for "italian" on the wiki shoul show all games with italian as an option.

Better yet, we could use the category system for that.

I decided to start the ball rolling. I just picked a game that I know comes in many languages (Beyond Good and Evil), added it to a category for each language it supports, added those language categories to a "Languages" category, and added that to "Games by". Now you can find games by language easily from the sidebar anywhere on the wiki.

(I probably shouldn't have bothered adding an "English" category, since all of the games are available in English anyway)

Now if a game supports German, for example, you can add it to the "German" category by editing the page and adding the following line to the end:
[[Category:German]]