Full audio support for other languages?

[KrZ]

With the tremendous -and well deserved- success of BG3, can players expect full audio support to be extended to other languages? German, French, Japanese, Turkish, etc.

[Mormacil]

Originally posted by KrZ:

Originally posted by Mormacil:

Dubbing indeed exists for a myriad of reasons. There's also a reason why subbing exists. Not a particularly compelling argument there.

But feel free to make a case in favor of dubbing in addition to the subs. Give me some figures on how much money this would make.

Originally posted by Mormacil:

Dubbing indeed exists for a myriad of reasons. There's also a reason why subbing exists. Not a particularly compelling argument there.

But feel free to make a case in favor of dubbing in addition to the subs. Give me some figures on how much money this would make.

Very simple - opening up new markets with millions of potential Customers to get additional revenue. Here's just one source and this is a for a single country:
https://laoret.com/blog/turkish-game-localization/

Now you show me data showing that dubbing is not a compelling strategy :MrFoster:

You're not opening new markets as those markets are already tapped by subtitles, that's been the whole issue raised in my comments this entire time.

I already stated that there is a lot to win when you localize a product. But after a subtitle localization exist a dub localization doesn't increase sales significantly. That's the crux of the issue here. Your link doesn't addresses that at all.

[goodbye_bonito]

I'm all out for more subtitle languages and improving localisation quality of existing subtitles.

But creating a dub is pointless and counter productive.

[Broan]

2 Reasons it won't happen

1st: The amount of Work to voice over in several languages would be insanely high.
Because you wouldn't have to just do it in other 1 Language or 2.
It would be expected to be probably more than at least 5 up to like 10, otherwise you would just please some small groups and neglect others. It would just multiply work and budget on voice actors. not doubling or tripling it - multiplying. Thats a LOT for something with the amount of voice lines as in Baldur's Gate 3.
You would probably have to go and cover Spanish, portugese, french, russian, chinese, german and and and. It's absolutely fine as it is.

2nd: The Lip Synchronization would be AWFUL, because EVERYTHING is made to work in English. Nothing else. You would either have to adapt Animations a lot to fit different languages (even more work to invest) or live with terrible lip sync and have People turn voice language to english anyway because it feels terrible if you even look a little bit on the faces when you have dialogue. And it wouldn't even matter how good the voice acting in different languages is quality wise, when you don't get lip sync right. Great example for that is Starfield. If you play with anything other then english Voice language you gonna SEE what i mean. The Voice acting for it self is high quality, no doubt. But it just doesn't feel good, because of the terrible lip sync. Which lead pretty much everyone i watched to turn it straight back to english, defeating the whole purpose of having their language dubbed.

TL:DR:
1. Amount of Work to do several Languages with as many voice lines/dialogues like Baldur's Gate is just way too high.
2. Lip Sync would be terrible and make people go back to english anyway without redoing dialogue animations all together. Look at starfield.

[Rex is back, baby!]

Krz, don't dishonor your intelligence. A cursory Google search would reveal how expensive what you're asking is.

Idealism and wants are great, but never forget to ground yourself with realism and needs.

An example of this within Free Market Capitalism is the notion of Supply and Demand. Investing money into.Supply, Larian has to make sure there's demand+ to offset the costs of development.

[Ruffio]

Between all the VA's in bg3 there is recorded over 190000 lines of dialogue... To expect VA translation to other languages is nuts...

[KrZ]

Originally posted by Rex:

Krz, don't dishonor your intelligence. A cursory Google search would reveal how expensive what you're asking is.

Idealism and wants are great, but never forget to ground yourself with realism and needs.

An example of this within Free Market Capitalism is the notion of Supply and Demand. Investing money into.Supply, Larian has to make sure there's demand+ to offset the costs of development.

So you are telling me Ubisoft is going through the trouble of adding full Arabic dub in their next Assassin's Creed game expecting nothing in return? Dying Light 2, which is known to have many lines of dialogues, is also dubbed in multiple languages.

There is demand in this area but you have to be bothered and do the market research.

[Mormacil]

Originally posted by KrZ:

Originally posted by Rex:

Krz, don't dishonor your intelligence. A cursory Google search would reveal how expensive what you're asking is.

Idealism and wants are great, but never forget to ground yourself with realism and needs.

An example of this within Free Market Capitalism is the notion of Supply and Demand. Investing money into.Supply, Larian has to make sure there's demand+ to offset the costs of development.

So you are telling me Ubisoft is going through the trouble of adding full Arabic dub in their next Assassin's Creed game expecting nothing in return? Dying Light 2, which is known to have many lines of dialogues, is also dubbed in multiple languages.

There is demand in this area but you have to be bothered and do the market research.

1) AC has significantly less dialogue, by a huge factor. Same goes for DL2 which never added voiced line after already paying for subtitles.

2) They're adding 1 specific language for immersion sake, it's a marketing ploy that also pulls in non Arabic speaking players.

[Rex is back, baby!]

Originally posted by KrZ:

Originally posted by Rex:

Krz, don't dishonor your intelligence. A cursory Google search would reveal how expensive what you're asking is.

Idealism and wants are great, but never forget to ground yourself with realism and needs.

An example of this within Free Market Capitalism is the notion of Supply and Demand. Investing money into.Supply, Larian has to make sure there's demand+ to offset the costs of development.

So you are telling me Ubisoft is going through the trouble of adding full Arabic dub in their next Assassin's Creed game expecting nothing in return? Dying Light 2, which is known to have many lines of dialogues, is also dubbed in multiple languages.

There is demand in this area but you have to be bothered and do the market research.

Exactly, market research, so you do have an understanding of how business works

Do some independent study. I'm sure you know basic accounting, statistics trend analysis, and economics.

You are almost there to realize the answer to your own question.

[KrZ]

Originally posted by Rex:

Originally posted by KrZ:

So you are telling me Ubisoft is going through the trouble of adding full Arabic dub in their next Assassin's Creed game expecting nothing in return? Dying Light 2, which is known to have many lines of dialogues, is also dubbed in multiple languages.

There is demand in this area but you have to be bothered and do the market research.

Exactly, market research, so you do have an understanding of how business works

Do some independent study. I'm sure you know basic accounting, statistics trend analysis, and economics.

You are almost there to realize the answer to your own question.

It's Larian's job to do that, not mine nor yours buddy Strange how people are defending lack of options when adding such options would most likely bring the studio more revenue.

[Mormacil]

It won't bring more revenue. We're not defending less options we're arguing against money losing ideas. But you seem to reject any data that doesn't support your idea so this seems kinda futile.

[KrZ]

Originally posted by Mormacil:

It won't bring more revenue. We're not defending less options we're arguing against money losing ideas. But you seem to reject any data that doesn't support your idea so this seems kinda futile.

What data? I am the only one who showed data in this thread to support my point

[Mormacil]

You only showed data not related to your point. You showed data that localization brings in more than no localization. That was never contested, your claim is that dubbing would bring in more than the cost when subtitles already exist.

[Morgian]

Larian did not invest in more voice acting because success was uncertain during the last 6 years.
I don't know how much a programmer makes, but assuming 70k per year and 400 on team (as per The Gamer) at the end, you look at staggering costs merely for personnel. If they started with the 150 from D:OS 2, lets take the average of 275, and you look at 115 million. Leaving out rent, energy, and the various other costs every business has to deal with there are also the fees for the WotC licence (we don't know what the deal was, but probably expensive, as Solasta could not afford it). A bit of a stretch in all probability, since we don't know how many people were on board for how long, how many were actually programmers and how many cheaper people, and how much money they get actually paid. But you get the idea that making the game was not cheap.
If they actually sold 5 million copies, they get a part of the revenue, not everything. Steam takes a piece of the cake, and there are the taxes. If they get 30 net per copy they look at 150 millions minus the costs. Since they did not have the cash after the near bankruptcy from the D:OS games there must also be loans to pay back. Makes one wonder if the venture was worth it financially.

After all is already finished, producing new full audio tracks costs more than it would have when done at start. Just hiring the speakers for all the languages would be a nice junk of cash, let alone travelling cost, studio rent, QA and so on.
Therefore I don't see it happening.

[KrZ]

Originally posted by Morgian:

...

Yes, rumor is [gameworldobserver.com] the game sold about 5 million units and that piece of info is nearly 3 weeks old.

Furthermore, those sales figure account for a single PC distribution platform, so gog and soon to be released console ports are not included. And let's face it, there is no doubt in my mind that the game will sell extremely well on playstation and xbox.

Look, I understand the stakes were high as they bet everything on this project. Very happy that they succeeded; in actual fact, they smashed all expectations and that is great . You did not see me ask for multiple dubs while the game was in early access or right on launch day

I can play BG3 in English without subs - that is no issue to me. I really want this game to succeed even more by making it accessible to as many folks as possible, and I believe one option is to provide multiple audio tracks, as other studios do.

[Jupp]

Larian Studios was just too lazy and obviously didn't want to spend money on this.

Bethesda managed it to support voice overs in various languages for Starfield.
And Starfield has a ♥♥♥♥ ton of text-lines as well.

As for "lip sync", this is not hard at all anymore and works mostly automatic for various languages. You don't have to manually animate faces anymore for other languages :)

However, in Starfield there is currently a bug when it comes to "lip sync" for other languages. I am sure it will get fixed.