Tower of Fantasy is under fire after putting out a request for localization help- Not so much for the localization itself but because they won’t foot the bill.
The game’s latest Dev Report sees the Tower of Fantasy Team starting a new program to crowdsource localization for the game.
“Despite how much we would like to improve our localization qualities, we know we still have a lot to work on. Thus, we will be launching the “Localization Specialist” program to enlist players to help us optimize our localization quality (of course, your contribution will be properly compensated with in-game rewards)”, the post reads.
No further details have been given about the program, but it seems like the most important details were made abundantly clear: It’s a free position, despite localization teams being a veritable part of a game’s development.
“Controller update is nice, but attempt to offload localization optimization work to player base then pay them “Company Scrip” is just a bad practice. I mean what’s next off load QA to players & pay them dark crystal. Tencent is a big company, go & actually hire some people“, writes one Twitter user, Rocket Punch, noting that the game’s global publisher is one of the richest mega corps in the industry.
Over on the Tower of Fantasy subreddit, one more user says this is actually a step up for the game- as opposed to when they helped with localization and got actually nothing.
“Just a FYI, there was a group of us that helped during the betas with localization and translation for English. To my knowledge, no one was compensated at all. We covered basically level 1-50 content”, writes redditor Aodan Gaming.
“I was told the devs would maybe give us a title or something but that nor any other compensation was given”, they continue. “Makes me less tempted to do it again, esp when they don’t outline the compensation upfront”.
Neither Hotta nor Level Infinite have commented on the matter at the time of writing.