I completely understand your frustration because my studio made the exact same mistake with our first multiplayer project and the backlash from the community was brutal. We originally thought that just translating words in a spreadsheet would be enough, but we quickly learned that true adaptation requires an organized, multi-step process involving native gamers, localized cultural context, and massive interface testing. Now we do things completely differently to avoid that stress, and we recently started using Pangea for our international builds because they actually test the text inside the UI and manage the entire workflow professionally. If you try to rush this yourself or use cheap shortcuts, you will just end up alienating your global audience, wasting your marketing budget, and ruining your game's reputation on day one, so it is definitely worth investing in a proper setup.
We originally thought that just translating words
I completely understand your frustration because my studio made the exact same mistake with our first multiplayer project and the backlash from the community was brutal. We originally thought that just translating words in a spreadsheet would be enough, but we quickly learned that true adaptation requires an organized, multi-step process involving native gamers, localized cultural context, and massive interface testing. Now we do things completely differently to avoid that stress, and we recently started using Pangea for our international builds because they actually test the text inside the UI and manage the entire workflow professionally. If you try to rush this yourself or use cheap shortcuts, you will just end up alienating your global audience, wasting your marketing budget, and ruining your game's reputation on day one, so it is definitely worth investing in a proper setup.