Delivering real-time culturalized content in the metaverse
Navigating through the metaverse does sound a little futuristic, but gamers around the globe are spending a lot of time here. Think online 3D virtual environments and augmented reality and you’re there. And while gaming is on the rise, the video game industry is working hard to retain customers (84 % of games have a retention rate of less than 50 %). Staying competitive and winning foreign markets has game producers finetuning and updating their products. What is lacking is a seamless process to handle the culturalization aspects of these updates. This is where the EU-funded ALTAGRAM4.0 project brings innovative services. Its one-stop web solution simplifies and clarifies the culturalization process to the video game market.
Interaction is key to the metaverse experience
“The metaverse will completely replace the ‘flat’ internet we know, and it will be used for everything, from corporate meetings and shopping to massive social gatherings and the game infrastructure is where the metaverse starts the development,” explains Marie Amigues, CEO of the host company, Altagram GmbH. And because this is occurring on a global scale, video games must fit the local culture. This is forcing the video game market to address issues such as translation as well as design and software interventions and different technical requirements. In Europe alone, there are 23 official languages spoken. The challenge is how to connect people, products and brands that don’t speak the same language. The answer is the Alocai metaverse culturalization platform, which integrates human creativity and AI to deliver a top gaming experience.
Meet the Alocai platform
Launched globally in the second half of 2021 by Alocai, the Alocai platform has already reached over 1 000 active users in less than 4 months, from language service providers, freelancers to video game studios. Alocai is central in the management of the localisation game project with modules that are helping the communication between all stakeholders on the project anonymously. Altagram team members have developed their own machine learning models in all culturalization aspects required for game projects (graphic, text, voice). Alocai will also offer a marketplace, available in 2022, where the ecosystem will be available to build a stronger and better localisation for games and later for the metaverse. It will offer all game companies, big or small, the possibility to reach billions of gamers worldwide instantly.
Move aside Google Translate and DeepL
“The addition of our new neural machine translation NMT engines in over 10 languages has allowed us to reduce the cost but, in particular, has helped to speed up the localisation process,” adds Amigues. These custom-trained NMT engines, built and designed for the gaming industry, are currently outperforming DeepL and Google Translate. This allows them to deliver localised content in a fraction of the time. Alocai is moving forward to be the leader in culturalization for the metaverse. This has created enormous opportunities in industries traditionally outside gaming that will now rely on video game localisation workflows to produce content. “We are best positioned to provide these services given our extensive experience in the gaming industry,” concludes Amigues.
Keywords
ALTAGRAM4.0, metaverse, video game, culturalization, localisation, Alocai platform, neural machine translation
