European markets and d20 publishers - a little survey

[The Sigil]

True, but...

I realize that for many companies that are composed of purely monolingual people this may not be an option, but there are a number of companies that DO feature bilingual (or more) members in their staff... Why not make this an issue inside the company? If you do know other languages, no one is more familiar with your product than yourself! Plus the design is already done. The most problematic thing I can see is learning the translation of some of the technical terms (elf in Spanish=elfo, orc in Spanish=orco, etc.), and that's nothing that a few well-placed emails can't fix. I think.
It seems to me these are missed opportunities, at least on the US side. Not sure how it would work for Mongoose and other UK-based companies. (Are there any other UK-based companies?)

Well, my entire staff speaks English (native), German (pretty fluently), and Hungarian (totally fluently).

Unfortunately, that staff consists of me. I'm already stretched thin as is, and can't take the time to translate my products and polish them all up - not for the relatively miniscule amount of revenue I'd make (heck, I've made little selling the products in English! ).

A good translation (that looks and feels like the original book was written in the translated language and does not feel "stilted" or "artificial") takes at least half as long as writing the original, in my experience (and I have translated a lot of stuff including entire books and magazine articles). That means that if a product takes 6 months to write, it would take another 3 months to translate it into language X. That means if I don't expect to make at least half as much in language X as I do in my native tongue, it's not worth the effort. It becomes even more expensive if I have to hire someone "outside" the company to do the work. I don't have the budget for that, either.

Much as I love Europeans (esp. Hungarians, where I lived for two years), I am afraid that English is the lingua franca for RPGs - and the lingua franca of Europe - and there is just too much cost and too little market involved to justify translation. Especially since most hard-core European gamers already know English and have the English rulebooks (at least, that was my experience while in Europe - YMMV).

--The Sigil

 

[Blacksad]

Something that Jim said strikes me as odd:

We sell direct to European distributors

Considering that my Hobby shop to get better deal and quicker delivery use sometimes an Australian distibutor for WotC and many d20 products.

And amazon, and many online company sells their product in Europe.

So I believe that many companies do not even know how many of their product get in Europe.

NB: I'm in France

 

[Jim Butler]

Something that Jim said strikes me as odd:


Considering that my Hobby shop to get better deal and quicker delivery use sometimes an Australian distibutor for WotC and many d20 products.

And amazon, and many online company sells their product in Europe.

So I believe that many companies do not even know how many of their product get in Europe.

NB: I'm in France

To further expound on this, we sell direct to the following distributors outside the U.S.:

Pegasus Spiele (Germany)
Welt Der Spiele (Germany)
Walrus & Carpenter (Australia)
Esdevium (U.K.)
Hobbygames (U.K.)
Grosnor (Canada)
Millenium (France)

I'm sure I'm missing a few; these are just the ones that jumped out at me from our sales reports.

It's true that some overseas retailers order from sources other than the distributors we typically sell to. Some order from other sources because they have a long-standing business relationship with them; others do so to get a better discount.

 

[sotterraneo]

Hi Matt! I remember you (mostly being a friend of your tireless Italian artist, Danilo Moretti 8-])

"Despite gaming being a social activity, competition does indeed exist between companies involved in the industry, as recent events have shown and, like any competitive structure, no participant wishes to give any advantage away for nothing. You may well do better if you take the time and trouble to contact publishers individually and privately. After all, no one knows who you are. . .".
Well, I'm a guy attempting to do a survey 8-]

Seriously, the problem of 'proprietary information' has been duly considered by me writing this survey. I hope my questions are right - not so much generic to make answers useless, not so 'intrusive' to give competitors unfair advantage. I DO know competition exist, but I know people love to brag and I think if some US pubòlishers strike a deal with an European publisher, he will most surely post it on its web site and tell everybody if he has the occasion. Not a bad strategy, in my eyes: telling a distributor "You know, I have just sold Italian and French translation rights..." could be a strong selling point!

"Heh This is not just the US, I hasten to add. It seemed quite a while before many people twigged we were actually British. On both sides of the ocean. . . "

Ha! You are only a crew member of the US Navy aircraft carrier 'Great Britain' with captain Tony Blair duly following Mr. Bush Jr. orders!

JUST KIDDING! JUST KIDDING!

Nonetheless, if you are willing to reply to my questions privately, please feel free to do so. My address is: casacco@numerica.it.

 

[sotterraneo]

"I would support the suggestion that you also contact a the publishers individually so they have the option of answering privately. Also keep in mind that this is the month leading to Gen Con in the US, and that means that most gaming publishers are working feversihly to get their stuff ready for the Big Con. After Gen Con things return to normal, and if by then you have received no answer you could try again".

I wasn't complaining, I was just voicing a little concern. I'm sure publisgers have more important things to work on - I just hope that they will lend me a helping hand.

"Not a problem for me, I know English, Spanish and enough Italian to read it and get 85% of it (oddly enough my knowledge of gaming terms in Italian is better than say my ability to ask for complex directions)".

Wow! An American who knows Italian gaming terms!

"Unfortunately, most Americans are monolingual".

British too, it seems...

"Agreed, but this is not the place for a socio-political-psychological debate on this issue".

Debate? No, no. Simply, I stated the Americans have this 'isolationist' attitude (well, they had it before September, 11) and gamers, being Americans, share it. No offence in that.

 

[sotterraneo]

Re: Re: European markets and d20 publishers - a little survey

Thank you so much for your answers, mr. Butler, but I'd like to rectify some misunderstandings about D&D...

"WotC and TSR both handled the situation in the past by licensing other companies to perform translations of their works, but that strategy didn't result in a capturing of a large portion of the market share".

Regarding Italy, this is simply not true. D&D, AD&D and DetD (Third Edition) were and are today, by an extremely large margin, the most sold and most played RPGs ever. In no other country, excluding the US, D&D/AD&D/DetD have found such a loyal audience. Just to let you know, I (and many of my fellow retailers) sell in my store Classic Dungeons & Dragons (in Italian and English), AD&D (in Italian mostly) and DetD (mostly in Italian, with a small minority buying English books excluding special situations as the Epic Level handbook that I predict will be a STRONG seller immediately). I don't have sales figures for all of my country, they are of course proprietary information of the Italian publisher (under license from WotC of course) has published a lot of books (if you go to www.dungeons.it and click on D&D Nuova Edizione you will see the complete ranmge of DetD translated titles), but I'm sure they sold many thousand copies of the core rulebooks. I have read that the new French publisher, Spellbook, has an impressive range of translations planned, so they are surely convinced there is a big market for DetD books there...

 

[sotterraneo]

"In fact, you're on one! "

Is this an European web site? Damn, why didn't anybody told me before? I kept describing to my fellow Italian gamers EN World as an AMERICAN web site. Shame on me 8-P

Hmmm... wait a moment: you are in Southampton, are you? So you are British and therefore, according to the UK press, not strictly Europe (The Economist, for example, keeps writing about 'UK and Europe' and 'the Continent' .

 

[Paradigm]

I am not going to get in the particulars of our private business issues but some answers:

We do sell our products in Europe and elsewhere outside the United States and we deal directly with the European distributors.

We would like to sell more to Europe, Asia and Australia, but then I think everyone would like to sell more of everything they make everywhere and anywhere they can. Canada and the UK are the most significant foreign markets for us as the language barrier is basically a non-issue.

Translation deals for the kind of volume that even highly-successful d20 publishers can attain isn't really all that much money. We would like to move our books in translated editions from a desire to share the hobby with the rest of the world.

 

[drakhe]

I'm not a distributer/publisher but would nevertheless like to comment on this subject. Maybe these comments can put a different angle on the European market.

The language should not be a barrier at all. From what I've heard on several boards and experienced myself in my gaming community, those that want games material in their own language are a minority. My mother tongue is dutch but I prefer my gaming material in english. Why ? Two simple reasons.

To me english is as much THE gaming language as it is for instance for computing. It's in english that most games are originaly developed and therefore it's in english that most material is available. And I've simply had to deal with way too many BAD translations (in: gaming, computing, novels, ...) that I simply prefer material in its original language ! (think for instance the problems created by having to translate rules for RPG's, subtelties in translation could eventualy lead to a completely different game !)

The second reason is as simple: us inhabitants of the european community have always needed to be able to express ourselves in several languages (added to that: the country I live in is bi-lingual dutch-french, maybe you guessed: Belgium) so english is spoken and understood by most people with basic schooling. This gives us a practical tool: In my gaming group we simply use dutch for OUT-game conversation and english for IN-game conversation. (or any other language appropriate to the game/character)

As a side note: I remember the days that Magic was printed in several languages: WOTC had very quickly declared the english version of the cards as the only tournament legal version ! And I've already heard talk of certain rules loopholes created by the french translation of the PHB.

So to summarize my 2 bits: the majority of gamers in europe (that I know of) prefer english quality material over (bad) translated material.

 

[drakhe]

After reading some more posts one more thought:

Not withstanding my previous notes on prefering english etc etc, I did mention the fact that it is in most cases fear of bad translations that lead to this preferance. Due to the OGL it has become much easier to produce original material based on a common theme/rules system. And off course original material in any of the other european languages is appreciated. I just feel that for the sake of clarity rules and rules issues should be limited to one language.