First One-Stop Video Game Culturalization Management Platform

Project Information

ALTAGRAM4.0

Grant agreement ID: 849628

DOI

10.3030/849628

Project closed

EC signature date 11 April 2019

Start date 1 May 2019

End date 30 April 2021

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Innovation In SMEs

Total cost

€ 2 007 446,25

EU contribution

€ 1 405 212,38

Coordinated by

ALTAGRAM GMBH
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - ALTAGRAM4.0 (First One-Stop Video Game Culturalization Management Platform)

Reporting period: 2020-05-01 to 2021-04-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Our company, Altagram GmbH, provides video game localization and culturalization services. Our team of 65 employees and network of 1000+ freelancers translate games into more than 50 languages.

The business need:

• The video game industry faces challenges to retain customers (84% of games have a retention rate of less than 50%). Games are updated weekly or monthly by over 51% of the game producers to stay competitive and win over foreign markets, and there is a lack of a quick and smooth process to handle the culturalization aspects of these updates.

• Culturalization projects use a large decentralized workforce of freelance service providers to perform individual tasks, which is very difficult to manage.

• The 23-spoken languages in the EU multiply the cultural barriers when addressing the EU market. Furthermore, there are huge cultural challenges faced when culturalizing video games for the Asian and USA markets.

• A number of disparate file types, software programs and methods are used for source files, translation, and project management, which increase the complexity of the process, and the turnaround time, and cost, and can result in errors. All of these factors are inconsistent with the demands of the gaming industry.

There is an urgent need for a single, integrated software platform to enable game publishers and culturalization service providers to collaborate, manage and to streamline the culturalization process, in order to meet the increasing demands of the video games industry for fast turnaround, high quality, and cost-effective culturalization.

From a social perspective, video games are entering a new era where they can unite masses of people around a common goal via social games such as Pokemon Go. Ensuring that video games are culturalized correctly can improve understanding and bridge cultural barriers. In fact, across Europe and elsewhere, the majority of parents consider that video games help their children to develop more skills and stimulate their creativity.

Furthermore, in times of the actual pandemic, the WHO is recommending video games as an effective way to stop the spread of COVID-19.

Our ultimate objective is for Altagram 4.0 to become a game-changer in the video game culturalization market. We envision a situation where all game development companies and game publishers manage their entire culturalization needs on our platform no matter if they are using external culturalization services or ours. As the entire market moves on AltaGram 4.0 semantic/deep learning features will be able to automate the culturalization of an increasing amount of contents (voice, text/caption and visuals).

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

During our Phase 2 Project we performed:

- Overall project management to ensure that project objectives are met according to the project plans. We also performed intellectual property (IP) management to identify, protect, and exploit the project IP; and knowledge management (KM) activities to gather and assimilate the project know-how.

- Customer development activities to validate our business models. We created a Customer Development Plan, a Preliminary Commercialisation plan (strategy, market uptake and replication) and a financing plan for the market launch and updated our Business Innovation Plan to eploit our project results.

- Communication and Dissemination activities to support exploitation, targeted towards potential customers, partners in the value chain, potential investors, end-users, and other stakeholders from research, commercial, social, environmental, policymaking, and standardization, educational training bodies etc.

- We defined advanced system specifications and architecture for the core framework of ALTAGRAM 4.0 to fit the marketplace functionality and culturalization algorithmic components.

- We analysed existing datasets from video game libraries.

- We examined recognizing patterns in data, addressing the classification problem with the selected deep learning models.

- We implemented novel Altagram 4.0 components complying with actual system specifications.

- We have been working on the integration of platform components and their demonstration to possible clients.

- We carried out Trials and Pilots to test our new technology.

- We launched our new Start Up company Alocai (www.alocai.com) under which we will commercialize the results of the project.

- Main result of the project os our Alocai Localization Management Platform including AI and ML functionalities and a marketplace.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Progress beyond the state of the art:

• Altagram 4.0 is the first combination of project management, and culturalization tools, with an online marketplace, in a single platform.

• Altagram 4.0 is based on our extensive inside knowledge of the international game culturalization industry, gained over a period of 12 years. Pure software development companies, who might consider developing a similar product, do not have our knowledge of the video game field.

• We have a network of 600+ freelancers, which translate games into more than 45 languages and working actively with 100 clients/year that are game developers/producers. This provides critical mass for the establishment of the unique market place feature of Altagram 4.0.

• AI is about data, and Altagram now has over 65 million words already localized professionally and error-free, in over 45 languages from English, French, Spanish and other source languages.

• We will gain a massive first-mover advantage by capturing more game localization and culturalization inputs and outputs into our database, for automatic AI culturalization. The AI culturalization performance of Altagram 4.0 will get better with time, as new AI training data is generated through the use of the platform, allowing us to maintain our advantage.

Expected Results:

In this Phase2 project, we will upscale our Altagram 3.0 TRL6 prototype to prepare Altagram 4.0 for market launch (TRL9). In the project, we will: i) beta-test the Altagram 4.0 platform with external users, ii) launch the marketplace functions to users, iii) design and integrate AI deep learning, iv) update our business implementation plan; and v) perform demonstration actions, and pilots, and disseminate and communicate the project results.

We plan to reach the market with Altagram 4.0 immediately after the end of the Phase 2 project in Q3 2021.

Potential Impacts:

For users; Altagram 4.0 will deliver economic benefits and time savings.

From a social perspective; video games are entering a new era where they can unite masses of people around a common goal via social games such as Pokemon Go. Ensuring that video games are culturalized correctly can improve understanding and bridge cultural barriers. In fact, across Europe and elsewhere, the majority of parents consider that video games help their children to develop more skills and stimulate their creativity.

European dimension; Altagram 4.0 will help European game companies and publishers to successfully enter the foreign markets, including Asia, by having culturally adequate and relevant game contents. We also aim to help Europe be as integrated and culturally sensitive as possible, and to also bridge the east-west divide in the world.

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