"The issues raised in the targeting of national and local audience, specifically British, by international or global institutions".

As the game industry has moved through generations with breakthrough consoles and highly demanded innovation, primarily targeting a national audience, it is becoming increasingly important for developers to focus on localising their games to cater for the widest audience range possible, increasing profits. This can be done in many ways from translation into different languages to altercations to suit cultural differences. However many developers disagree that localisation of games isn't important and so opt to target national audiences. This means that games can be much more easily altered and cater for a specific larger group of people rather then spending huge amounts of time and money focusing on alterations for a much smaller local group. This allows people to play games without concern as offensive content would be removed to deal with this limitation.

In order to sell games to the widest audience range possible, in many cases, gaming products (eg. consoles) have to be changed due to issues and legal requirements in some countries. China is one of the most well known examples of gaming product adaptations from the ban that was set in place in 2000, as the Chinese government deemed games consoles to "corrupt the mind of the teenage generation". This seems quite hypocritical and ironic when you consider that the Wii, the PS3 and the Xbox 360, the three major leading gaming consoles out there now, are Chinese made and there is a flourishing PC gaming culture. However, in recent years Plug'n'play consoles became a legal alternative to the banned home consoles. The Chinese government approved games that didn't exactly look like a console but could hold multiple games, characters and products, thus the the iQue Player released by Nintendo was available for sale at $60 (US). The iQue Player holds specifically ported games such as Nintendo 64 and any new games have to be downloaded on to a memory card at a local game retailer that slot into the controller which encases the console. Also alternative models of the PS3 have been approved by the 'China Quality Certification Centre'. This shows that the console itself had to be modified in production to enable it to be available to the consumers of China, which is one example of a localisation technique.

Alterations to the console isn't always the case or main concern and doesn't have to take place. The games themselves are more likely to be "localised" to fit certain cultural niches. To maximise sales as much as possible worldwide localisation takes place through different areas such as; graphic capabilities, local differences, language, cultures, software/hardware and music within the games. A strong example of how localisation can be an issue is that it takes a lot of time, which can prevent publishers from announcing one worldwide release date and then in turn impact on profits. A thing to consider would be the huge array of voice actors that make an appearance in GTA V and finding for example Japanese alternative voice actors that would be required to translate the vocabulary efficiently for local appeal and the length of time it would take to do this. Also in 1997, after it's Japanese release, Final Fantasy VII only reached the US 7 months after this and a further 2 months until it was on sale in the UK and Europe. Full translation and adaptations to the game expanded the time and prevented a worldwide release date due to localisation issues.

Cultural laws play a huge role in game sales internationally as a lot of countries have obvious restrictions on what is appropriate and acceptable for the people of their national audience. Due to WW2, any reference to the swastika is against the law, and that goes for game content aswell. On the release of Call of Duty: Black Ops in 2010 which contained zombies displaying swastika symbols, it immediately became highly offensive and caused an uproar with parents and so were removed from the German localised version of the game, showing that not only language is a barrier to cross when publishing a game. Also an example of a cultural change in a game stemmed from Chinese culture where bones are inappropriate to use and for this reason, the skeletons in the "Wizard 101" Chinese version were removed.

In conclusion, although I believe it is a necessity for games to be localised as national audiences still need to understand the game to play it from a linguistic point of view, some issues such as offensive content may not be able to be controlled easily. In other words, if games focused all their attention on localising every aspect of every game, how long would it take to cater nationally for all audiences individually without any offensive references whatsoever. The release times would be a huge problem and can we really eradicate all components of a game just in case they may be offensive?? what would be left?? However it is still a very important issue that needs to seriously be considered as one small factor could result in a whole audience being offended and not buying the game or any of the sequels in the future, reducing sales and profits.      

Uk Distributors

Advantage Distribution became an established distributor chain in February of 2003. Their role is delivering/distributing games to both publishers and retailers involved in the interactive entertainment industry, from huge platform holders such as Bethesda and Nintendo etc. Their supplies contain many various hardware and software (3000 titles), which within include a subsequent amount of interactive games. Advantage have created partnerships with well known retail distributors such as; Argos, Littlewoods, Express Gifts and Very, through delivering the stocks of units (games) in bulk to be sold individually by the retailer. This creates a highly reliable and popular system.

Distributors of Games (case study)

The distributors for our two main Case studies are; Take Two Interactive for the distribution of the GTA games and XPEC Entertainment for the long awaited Skylanders:Giants. The distributor of the original Angry Birds app released on the IPhone was Chillingo. Chillingo was an outside distributor that had to be found due to a loss of money so, they had to source out other link companies for this part of the business whereas because Take Two interactive is the distributor for the GTA franchise, being a successful franchise at the least, vertical integration is able to take place in order to sell the game. This is because Take Two Interactive and Rockstar own the distributors for the GTA games so they can control and afford to sell the games through their own company.

UGC - User Generated Content

User Generated Content (UGC) is exactly what it sounds like. It is the term associated with components that are created, in video game terms, by the consumers of the games, to allow a higher level of personalisation and creativity in many various forms. UGC can range from creating items that assist you within the game to whole new levels themselves to enhance the gaming experience.
A prime example of a game that highly utilises the use of user generated content is Little Big Planet. Little Big Planet is all about the creativity of the player as throughout the game they will collect a wide range of stickers, additional props/clothing and objects that can be used to build and share their own levels.

One clear advantage of user generated content is that it prolongs the life span of games as new content is always being shared and updated/upgraded, meaning people will always be creating new experiences due to the new features. Also UGC creates a sense of involvement with the consumers as they get to create and essentially be part of the game rather than just play a standard RPG and complete a mission.
However, developers have  raised the concern that the use of user generated content within games will reduce DLC sales as if consumers could create and get free levels and items in a game, then why spend money on DLC that is not required??
Also if user generated content was to become the future, it would see the end to huge franchises such as GTA etc as it is very unlikely that role playing games with characters that have background history and a set storyline will become open to be changed from content created by the consumers. These huge franchises are not popular for nothing, and so makes the future in UGC very unlikely.