How To Avoid Poor Localization Quality Damaging Your Game's Launch
You’ve possibly heard about a recent major release that’s suffered from poor localization. Critically, this poor localization was for Simplified Chinese, damaging the game’s release performance in the world’s largest games market.
But what happened? And importantly, how can you reduce the chance of this happening to your releases?
ECI Games is China’s leading video game localization company. Before explaining what happened with the Simplified Chinese Localization on the recent release of Silksong, we want to extend our thoughts to the Team Cherry team. We completely understand how difficult it is for teams of any size to manage a major release, and particularly one across languages and markets. Vetting the quality of a localization is incredibly difficult for small teams, particularly when working with freelancers across multiple languages. Our observations that follow have this in mind, and our recommendations are solely intended to allow other developers to learn from the issues raised.
A Brief Situational Overview
On September 4th, 2025, the highly anticipated title Hollow Knight: Silksong was released. Fans had been patiently waiting for the game since 2017, which saw the release of the title’s predecessor, Hollow Knight.
Silksong released to praise from markets around the world, with excellent reviews from players and publications. While some players have complained about issues like notably high difficulty, in general the release was very well received.
Unfortunately, this solid reception didn’t extend to Chinese players. This was caused by one major issue: Localization Quality.
Chinese players were some of the most vocal fans of Silksong before release. It was so anticipated that, on release, it actually crashed Steam’s servers due to over 500,000 people buying the game at the same time. This even led to Chinese-speaking players making a name for the effect, “全网404,”, which roughly translates to “The entire network is 404”.
But back to localization; Silksong released to an impressive 92% rating on Steam, with minor fluctuations across languages thanks to Steam’s new Localized User Review system. But Chinese user reviews were dramatically different, dropping down to only 52% recommended.
Interestingly, there had been warnings. When the demo was shown at Gamescom in August 2025, players already had discussed concerns with the localization, due to strange word choices that felt unnatural.
Unfortunately, it’s likely there wasn’t time to delay the release or re-translate before the impending release, so the existing localization was maintained. When Chinese players saw the full release, they were met with bizarre, archaic, and unnatural translations that took liberties with the source text.
As noted by Loek Van Kooten, below is an example of the original text, compared with an English translation of the in-game Chinese localization:
The English Source Text:
“No mind to think. No will to break. No voice to cry out in suffering. Born of God and Void. You are the Vessel. You are the Hollow Knight.”
The (Re-Translated) Simplified Chinese Localization:
“With nary a spirit nor thought shalt thou persist, bereft of mortal will, unbent, unswayed. With no lament nor tearful cry, only sorrow’s dirge to herald thine eternal woe. Born of gods and of the fathomless abyss, grasping heaven’s firmament in thine unworthy palm. Shackled to endless dream, tormented by pestilence and shadow, thy heart besieged by phantasmal demons. Thou art the chalice of destiny. Verily, thou art the Primordial Knight of Hollowness.”
You don’t need to be a linguist to see that this breaks many of the core rules of localization. It notably extends the text, it takes liberties with the source, and it doesn’t provide the same, or similar, experience to players. Whether or not the “poetry” is well written is beside the point, ultimately it did not provide an understandable, enjoyable experience.
As you would imagine, this localization did not go down well with Chinese players.
This Isn’t a Unique Situation:
Back in 2018, Darkest Dungeon, the esteemed rogue-like strategy title, added Korean Localization post-release. While the game already had fan localizations, with many understanding that Indies can’t afford to localize into every language at release, this was meant to be the addition of a full, professional localization.
Unfortunately, the Korean linguists did not do a tremendous job, failing to maintain the consistent quality of other languages. Fans immediately noticed the drop in quality from Fan Localization to “Professional”, and showed that displeasure by review-bombing the game.
As an example, one Reddit user noted (using English equivalents):
Fan Localizations:
“Ruin has come to our family.”
“Greatly increases the hound's vigor for a short time. “
Official Localization:
“Ruin is part of our family now”
“Greatly increases the hound's "sexual desire" for a short time”
As you can immediately tell, it’s simply a poor-quality localization that likely didn’t look at much reference material. The Game’s developer Red Hook Studios responded immediately, explaining that they didn’t have a Korean speaker on the dev team to check the text but they appreciated player issues with the localization.
The Localization went on to be fixed and the game returned to good reviews in Korean. This is a perfect example of how to react to a localization problem: Acknowledge, Understand, and Improve. Players responded in kind, often stating online that they felt Red Hook truly wanted to fix the problem and cared about their player base.
Recommendations to Avoid Problems when Launching Localized Titles
While we’ve got endless recommendations for improving localization generally, we wanted to compile a shorter list focusing on the problems raised in the examples above:
1. Make Sure Your Localization and Development Teams are Synced: Expectations, Workflows, and Goals.
This is an important point when working with Freelancers or professional vendors: Make sure your localization team understands exactly what you want.
This may sound obvious but there’s many intricate choices within localization that can dramatically change the final product. For example, you’ll want to make sure you’re aligned on:
- How much creative liberty do you want the localization team to have?
- Do you have any preferences regarding tone or linguistic style?
- How would you like the team to approach localizing specific cultural elements that may be relevant to the game’s setting?
- Do you have preferences regarding the localization of specific in-game terminology like Spells, Items, etc?
Thorough reference material will often help alleviate issues linked to these questions, but ensuring that everyone is of the same understanding at the beginning of localization will make a big impact in avoiding later problems.
2. Third Party Reviewers and Separate Translators/Editors/Proofreaders.
The most direct method of ensuring your launch localization quality is using a third-party reviewer that you trust. This could be another vendor, another freelancer, trusted community members, or even a fellow developer who’s a native speaker of the language.
It’s essentially impossible for any team, even of AAA size, to have members that understands every language the game will be released in. It’s also almost impossible to analyze the quality of a localization without a deep understanding, and preferably native knowledge, of the language.
The best professional vendors will always ensure that localizations are not conducted by single linguists per language. Typically, this will take the form of separate Translators, Editors, and Proofreaders within the standard TEP (Translation, Editing, Proofreading) workflow. This reduces the chance of a poor localization even getting to the developer, as the separate reviewer will flag issues before text is delivered.
To further ensure quality, you can ask your vendor if they can provide a contact for third party reviewing, or you can find someone yourself. It’s the easiest way of alleviating concerns with a localization, giving you more confidence in your release.
3. Work With Professional Vendors
First of all, we’re obviously a little bias on this point. We always recommend working with professional vendors to ensure your localized release goes well. This isn’t to say that vendors are perfect, or that they’ll never cause issues, but you will typically have more options to fix those problems than with freelancers.
When selecting vendors, ask them what their policy is for re-translation in the case of a poor delivery – will they re-translate the text for free or provide other methods of recourse? Will they provide a third-party reviewer to help identify issues?
Many vendors will provide re-translation in these instances, and if they don’t then you can find another that will. Working with professional vendors also reduces the pressure on your team to analyze the quality of freelancers, as well as managing the ongoing translation.
Experienced Project Managers are so often underappreciated, but they’re the bulwark of quality in games localization. Project Managers are typically the first to notice problems and are the best suited to identify causes, fixes, and workarounds. While the structure of a professional localization vendor provides security and trust within itself (due to size, processes, etc), it’s the project managers who truly provide the quality of service that improves the experience and output for developers and publishers.
4. Don’t Assume That Everything Will be Fine. Localization is Fundamental.
This isn’t to say that any developer rests on their laurels when it comes to releases, but localization’s importance for launch performance is often underappreciated. As we’ve seen, all it takes is one poor localization in a major language to impact many years of hard work. At the same time, excellent localization can improve regional performance drastically. All players, regardless of location, expect the core experience intended by the developer.
Despite the importance of growing global player bases and the high ROI of localization, it is often still regarded as an afterthought, or a box to tick. Localization should be considered an important part of every release, allowing you to access millions of players you otherwise wouldn’t be able to.
To make sure you’re ahead of problems before they become major, make sure you’re paying close attention to player feedback when releasing localized demos, trailers, or other localized pre-launch content. Consider engaging with the community directly through regional community managers, especially in markets like China. This feedback can help you identify areas to improve, issues with localization, or just give you peace of mind if players are responding positively.
Ultimately, localization should be regarded as a feature of the game, not simply as a different version of the text. Localization’s impact on player enjoyment can go further than almost any other aspect of the game; You could make the greatest game ever but if players can’t understand what’s happening, everything else fails with it.