Spanish Game Localization: Which Spanish Variant to Choose

The Spanish game market by definition refers to the games that are made, published, or localized into the countries where people speak Spanish as an official language. In Particular, We are talking about Latin America and Spain.

For that matter, we can see two opposite pictures of the market. In Spain, we see a flourishing industry, especially in Barcelona. While on the other side, we see slowly developing to an underdeveloped market in Latin America. Between the two markets, gaming companies in general and Spanish game localization services in specific, are confused about the way to Localize games into multiple Spanish variants. The following blog will point out some relatable issues to Spanish game localization and the Spanish video game market.

In the beginning, let’s have a look at the Spanish video game market both in Latin America and Spain. Latin America is a region of twenty countries. it’s 650 million people living in this region. The biggest country is Brazil with 278 million people. The second one is Mexico. Both countries are the biggest economies. When you think about getting into Latin America, you can think about just translating into Spanish, more precisely Latin American Spanish and you will get a whole region of 19 countries that will understand your games. 

Latin America is very important in these moments because it is the region that is growing the most in terms of economy. Latin America and the Caribbean islands have a compounded annual growth rate of 3.2 percent. 

The biggest economy for the games market is in Brazil with 1.46 billion dollars. The next one is Mexico then Columbia and Chile. Even if Brazil is bigger it’s very similar to the Mexican market. 

Latin America will have the second-highest installed base in the world of smartphones so that’s where you should be focusing now for your games in terms of mobile operators. So far, Arcade games seem to dominate the gaming market for being the most affordable thing for most Latinos. 

There’s no other region that comes close to Latin American in terms of growth potential. This is important because as you get there sooner is the best because there’s going to be a lot more users spending money on the games.

Gameloft is the biggest one that really distributes mobile games but the rest of the gaming companies are more into the console market. Brazil has the largest industry for gaming development but they are not doing as well as in Argentina. Argentina has a very successful case of games for example Pillados or Trivia Crack which has been a dominant game in the last year. Mexico and the rest of the countries are more into console game development than into mobile games. 

To sum up, apart from its great potential, the Spanish video game market in Latin America is still very basic and underdeveloped. There are many challenges that Spanish game localization services and games developers and or producers encounter in this market. Games piracy, low banking penetration rate, and most importantly the overall low lifestyle and economy make most Latinos consider playing games more like a luxury thing than a normal leisure time hobby.

On the contrary video game localization in Spain and the overall gaming market have been flourishing in the past few years. Particularly, Barcelona is a global hub for game developers accounting for half of the industry’s earnings in Spain. Beyond giants like Ubisoft and Gameloft, there is a thriving community of indie firms creating imaginative and daring games. The pizza Situation is one of them. The pizza situation is a social network simulator where you have to investigate And manipulate to achieve your ultimate goal which is pizza.

Video game development studies have skyrocketed planting the first seed for the creation of some studios. In Catalonia, there have been a lot of newer industries popping up in the last few years. There are some great games like Gris and Monster Prom.

The industrial boom also attracts international talent. In recent years Barcelona has exploded in terms of Technology. Barcelona-Catalonia is the largest videogames hub in Southern Europe offering a great opportunity for global studios seeking to open their European headquarters. Its location was key for the success of video game localization in Spain. Barcelona is in the heart of Europe, and this is really valuable when it comes to providing game localization services into Spanish service to your customers, to your players, because it covers a wide range of time zones in the center of Europe. And also, the city is really well-connected, so when it comes to attracting new talent, it’s really easy to convince people to go there and build great products. With Barcelona hosting the Mobile World Congress and already being a global benchmark in mobile gaming, video game companies like Ubisoft are also taking advantage of the opportunities to invest in AAA studios.

The challenge that game localizers face when localizing their games into Spanish is what variants of Spanish they should be using. Latin American Spanish and European Spanish are massively different to the point that they should be considered distinct languages. Therefore, gaming companies try to be neutral in their approach when translating and localizing their games into Spanish. To begin with LATAM Spanish with a neutral variant of Spanish that is common in Latin America. Latinos all over the region are familiar with this variant as they encounter it in dubbed movies and subtitled videos. However, neutralism is still not enough to deliver authentic gaming content to the gamers in Latin America. Therefore, they always ask for regionalizing the language in translation or taking the specific terms, slang, and register of each Latin American Spanish variant like Argentinian Spanish, Mexican Spanish, 

However, Video game localization in Spain uses purely the European variant. The market, however, is of over fifty million players. As is the case in Latin America, Video game localization in Spain faces a variety of accents and dialects in Spain. generally, they all speak the European variant or Castilian Spanish. Targeting one country makes Video game localization in Spain more doable than it is in Latin America. Localizers leverage the situation by implementing European Spanish colloquialisms with the reference to the specific cultural connotations.