The Canadian Press reports that the Quebec government and the Entertainment Software Alliance have reached an agreement under which all video games sold in Quebec will be translated into French.
Quebec Gov’t Strikes Deal with ESA on French Language Video Games
August 19, 2007
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Great!
Just great… Another stupid political move that will serve no real purpose and will limit the products available to us in Qubec. When will the government understand that with only 7 million people, we aren’t a big enough market to force our policies on the world? If a content producer wasn’t going to translate it in the first place, this won’t change that. They’ll just choose not to sell it here.
I disagree
To have more game available in French in Qubec is good news.
As I understand it, this deal will only force games that are translated anyway (for Europe) to be made available in French over here too. If it’s the case, it only means that games available in French in France, for example, should be localized from PAL to NTSC so they can be played in French here too.
If that’s the case, what’s the problem?
Of course, if Qubcois gamerss
are denied some games because the publisher don’t want to pay for the localization or because the law is too strict to allow games that are not translated (what happens to indie games in that case?), then everybody lose.
Can you say “mail order”?
How do they define ‘sold in Qubec’? I can see Amazon’s sales of video games to Qubec going up… then I can see an amazon.qc.ca shop that doesn’t sell Engll
ish only games 🙂