Why This Japanese Developer Added Localization for an Entire Language Because of ONE Specific Player

The World Baseball Classic, often incorrectly called the Baseball World Cup, is a worldwide event celebrating baseball from countries around the world. While many already know that Baseball is popular in North America and East Asia, the WBC often surprises fans with teams from countries that don’t often shout about their love of the sport.

Many of these teams from less-basebally countries aren’t just professionals, many include enthusiastic amateurs eager to show off their skills on the world stage. In 2023, this mix of professionals and amateurs led to some fantastic headlines.

One of the most well known events from WBC 2023 involved Ondřej Satoria, pitcher for the Czech national team, up against Shohei Ohtani. For anyone who doesn’t follow baseball, Shohei Ohtani is regarded as one of the best baseball players of all time, perhaps even the best. In contrast, Ondřej Satoria is a full-time electrician in Czechia. In a match-up between these two players, electrician Ondrej managed to strike out Ohtani, enrapturing fans. Ohtani, as expected, took this in the best way possible, even asking Satoria for a signed Czechia team jersey.

This fun, unexpected comradery between Japan and Czechia was a fun flash-in-the-pan. No-one expected this to come up again…..

In the last week, an indie developer in Japan at Eba Game put up a small announcement on social media. He had decided to add Czech localization, right as the game is approaching release. That isn’t an easy decision to make, implementing a new language will take time and we’d always advise avoiding doing this at the last minute. But, Eba Games wanted to do this and went ahead. The reason they added Czech loc? One. Single. Wishlist.

Eba Games wrote:

“One day, when I checked my wishlist, I saw that just one person from Czech Republic had signed up.

Lately, from the World Baseball Classic, I know how much respect Czech Republic has for baseball and Japan.

So for the sake of this one baseball fan in Czech Republic, I implemented Czech language too. Wait for me, my Czech friend"

And that’s the whole story, really. A sweet, lovely situation about how adding localization shows you care. Whether that’s for millions of local fans, or just one. And it’s not just fans that notice, the industry (and baseball) does too:

“Wait for me, my Czech friend”

If you want to see how localized VO takes this a step further, read our article here: Localized VO: Are You Reaching your Players?

If you want to show your fans how much they matter, speak to ECI Games today about localization and VO: Info@ECIgames.net