Hi,

For the profile here at the new CCO website, you are asked which languages you speak. Assumably this is for the reviewing process, so that you can review games in languages that you actually speak?

What makes me wonder is, that the available choices are only English, French, Italian and Spanish.

The selection seems to correspond to the main languages of the 6 countries (US, Canada, UK, France, Italy, Spain) which are initially able to participate in XBLCG (as buyers and submitters), but I wonder if that connection is really sensible here?

I can think of several scenarios where this could become problematic. For example, assume there's a US developer (i.e. who is allowed to submit games). What if this developer decides to also provide a language in his game other then the 4 mentioned ones? There could be several good reasons for this:

• Maybe the developer is simply trying to cover other widely spoken languages (German, Portugese, Chinese, Japanese, etc.), working under the assumption, that even though the people from those countries can inititially not buy from XBLCG, there could still be people living in one of the 6 eligible countries, who would prefer one of these other languages (perhaps a German person who moved to Italy or so?).
• Or the developer is trying to prepare for the future, when other countries will also be able to download XBLCG games. It would certainly be a good idea to include the languages of those countries already now, in the first submission, otherwise the developer would have to re-submit a new version of the game (with the new languages) at a later time, which would also mean a second review process (even for the already approved languages, since that would be a new submission). Also it would go against the rule of "Don't resubmit an existing game for new features [=new languages in this case], but only for necessary bugfixes".

All in all, a developer who is conscious about the language/localization problem, and actually makes the effort to support other languages then English, may certainly want to support more then just the mentioned 4 languages right from the beginning...

So how is this supposed to go, as the CCO site currently seems to support only those 4 languages?
Is it allowed to have Games that support other languages anyway? And if so, how will the review of these languages be handled?

Thanks for any clarification,
Doc

P.S. And my congratulations for the XNA 3.0 launch and the new CCO site launch!

When you submit a game, you have to select which languages it is in. If you have a game with languages outside of the 4 supported, the game should be rejected during peer review. As we add more languages, then games can ship with more languages. We'll have a community spotlight about peer review going up in the next few weeks that should answer more questions or head over to the faq and read up on peer review in there.

Hi,

Thanks for your question it's a good one about language. Sean is correct in that the main driver of what languages we can handle in games is what languages can be supported in peer review and in contravention, with peer reviewers being the first line of defense.

For that reason, being very accurate and checking off languages in your profile when you speak more than one, will give you more opportunity to review as a peer reviewer and you should definitely edit your profile if you haven't already to reflect languages you truly speak.

Cheers,

Betsy
XNA Team

Jenkmeister:

If you have a game with languages outside of the 4 supported, the game should be rejected during peer review.

Interesting information. I must admit that I hadn't seen that the FAQ was changed (I had only read it a while back). Although the information currently in the FAQ does probably not really state this quite clear enough (it can only be deduced from the answers to the last question in the "Game Peer Review" block). So thank's for the clarification.

While thinking about this, I wonder about the following:

You write that a game with languages outside of the 4 supported should be rejected. This seems to imply that there are no automatic measures that prevent such a game from being submitted in the first place. (Understandably, as this is technically probably not even possible.)

So are peer reviewers required to check this, i.e. to check that a game actually only supports these 4 languages?

Because the method for testing this would be quite tedious: Go the XBox dashbord -> System blade -> change language to any of the unsupported languages. Navigate to Games Library (by touch-and-feel, as you will now probably not understand the dashboard texts anymore, with the new language), start the game you are reviewing and check if it displays the unsupported language (=reject it) or not (i.e. it defaults to its default language like its supposed to). Then repeat with all other languages on the System blade (other than the support 4 languages) - and that are quite a few!

Surely this can not be expected from peer reviewers?

So how is a reviewer then supposed to find the unsupported language in the game in the first place? The only way how this could happen would be by accident, if for example someone submits a game with German language, and a German peer reviewer, with his dashboard set to German language, happens to review the game and notices that the game actually is displayed in an unsupported language.

Other than this accidential discovery, unsupported languages will not be found during peer review.

Or am I missing something here?

Doc

When you review a game, at the end, you will say something like "I confirm I reviewed this game in language X". This helps us keep track of which language have been reviewed for this specific binary. The system will only let a game go through if all languages have been reviewed. If you want/can review several languages, awesome please do it but if you don't want/can't it's not mandatory. We'd rather have an accurate review in one language than a review that pretend to check 3 languages but is wrong.

Thanks Julien for the reply, but to be honest, I already understood all this. :-)

The question still stands: If a game offers a language that is not supported and should therefore be failed (according to what Jenkmeister said above), how is a reviewer supposed to even notice this?

Imagine this: Someone submits a game that supports English and Polish. The latter is not supported, therefore the game should fail during review. However, none of the reviewers will even notice that the game supports Polish. The submitter didn't tell anyone this, he simply checked the "English" checkbox during submit (even if he had wanted to, there is no Polish checkbox he cold have checked in the first place!).
In this scenario it is absolutely likely that none of the reviewers happens to have an XBox that is set to Polish. Therefore, all reviewers will see the game in English, and will thus pass the game for "English". Since this is the only language that the game was submitted for, the game will thus be passed to XBLCG.

I.e. through a simple lie (or omission), the game passed even though it contains an unsupported language.


The problem that I see with this review-must-happen-for-each-supported-language approach is the following:

[This is gonna be a bit lengthy, but now that I started with it, I can just as well continue ;-) - and maybe you can use this as input if this topic should be up for discussion in the XNA team again...]

As a game developer, you have the choice between localizing your game to different languages or not. Localizing is what you should do, because it's user friendly. However, it puts a large burden on you, because it adds additional work. So many developers are already inclined not to localize their games. And now the XBLCG framework penalizes them even more: If you take the "good but hard" route and actually localize your game, you then have the danger that your game will not even make it through review, because there may not be enough reviewers to review your game for all languages that you put into it!
While the lazy developer who already saved a lot of work by not localizing in the first place, now has the additional advantage of going through review more easily, because he only needs reviewers for one language (which will then most likely be English, for which there are the most reviewers anyway).

With this the XBLCG framework is sending entirely the wrong message to developers, because essentially it says: It's really better not to localize your game - just release it in English and you will be much happier...


My humble suggestion (if this ever is up for re-evaluation) would be to get rid of the requirement for per-language-reviews alltogether.

That may sound revolutionary ;-) but please bear with me for a moment:

Instead, the terms of use for XBLCG could state something like: If you submit a game with multiple languages, then by submitting you vouch, that each language version is a faithful translation of the other language versions.

So if you have seen the game in one language, then you don't need to see it in another language. For reviews that means, that the language of the game (that the reviewer looks at) is irrelevant for passing/rejecting the game. The reviewer simply says: In the language I have seen, all texts are OK, and because the submitter has vouched that the other languages are faithful translations, I don't have to see them all. And neither do any other reviewers, i.e. if by coincidence all reviewers check out the game with the same language, and other languages are therefore entirely "unseen" during review, then that wouldn't matter, as these other languages would only be faithful translations anyway.

OK - at this point I can almost imagine the "but" that I'm gonna hear. That would be something like: But even if the submitter is vouching that all languages are faithful translations, who is gonna control this? Maybe he is lying? Isn't this what peer review is for, to make sure the submitter is not lying?

Well, generally yes, of course. Only I would respond:

The peer review process is not very watertight anyway. There are large areas where Microsoft is extending a lot of trust towards the submitters anyway, trusting/hoping that the submitters will stick to the rules and not try to smuggle something through peer review. There are a myriad ways how a malignant submitter could very easily smuggle content through peer review and it would be very simple to do (I'm sure the XNA team is aware of this too).

Let me sketch two scenarios:

In scenario one, there's a game with English as its only language. Reviewers will therefore see this single language and can therefore vouch for it. But is this a guarantee that the game does not contain any offensive/forbidden text? It is surely not. There could very well be hidden texts with forbidden content in the game that simply are not found during peer review, but that are nonetheless seen by players who later get the game through XBLCG.

In the second scenario, there's a game with English and Polish. As it happens, all reviewers look only at the English language, so the Polish part remains "unreviewed". Therefore the texts in Polish could actually contain forbidden material. But so could the English texts! Because as in the first scenario, there is no guarantee that the reviewers will see all English texts either, so there could be some with forbidden material too.

Only in the first scenario, trust is extended to the submitter, that if reviewers don't find anything offensive in the readily accessible texts of the game, that then there probably won't be any offensive hidden texts either, so the game is passed. (But if any offensive texts that were smuggled through peer review are found at a later time, the full weight of MS's legal team will probably drop on the perpetrator - so it's a trust backed by a very real threat, namely that if the trust is abused, and MS finds out, you won't like it!)

Why can not a similar trust/threat be extended to the second scenario too, i.e. if reviewers don't find anything offensive in the readily accessible English texts of the game, that then there probably won't be any offensive hidden texts in the English version either, nor in the Polish version?
Isn't the Polish version in this case simply an extension of the other not-so-accessible English texts that reviewers have not seen and that we now simply trust to be all right too?

I.e. even in an English-only game, there is always a chance that there is a certain set of texts that reviewers will not see. So in an English+Polish game where reviewers only look at the English version, this set of "unseen" texts is simply a bit larger, now also including the Polish texts.

The chance that a malignant submitter would try to smuggle offensive texts through peer review by putting them in the Polish texts and leaving the English texts "clean" is no greater than that a submitter would try to hide text in a single-language (English) game.

Well, my rambling is probably long enough by now and you may start to wonder why I even care so much (I do wonder myself at this point ;-). So let me close with the following:

What it boils down to is what I started off with, that the per-language-review requirement is sending a bad message, namely that you should better not localize your game, or you may hurt its chances in peer review if you can't find enough reviewers for all languages.

And at the same time, as I argued in detail above, this is totally unnecessary, because simply dropping the per-language-review requirement would not have an additional negative effect, in the sense that it would not make smuggling of offensive content easier than it already is anyway. The danger that because of this a malignant submitter would now find it easier to get something offensive through would be not really be any greater than before.

And it would even make the whole peer-review process a bit simpler too, if submitters and reviewers wouldn't have to care about languages anymore...

Doc