An online and mobile expert since 1998, Oscar Clark is the evangelist for gameplay video sharing tool Everyplay from Applifier.

Games is a global business. That's pretty obvious, but how does that practically affect the way you approach how you develop your game?

I'm asking that question sitting in Bogata at the COL 3.0 conference with the opening panel for the games track. The room is full of aspiring South American developers listening to experts from the region who have managed to make profitable games.

The core questions they are asking the panelists are the same I hear from studios around the world. How do we get funding? How do we monetise? How do we get discovered? What happens after launch? How do we make our games relevant to international audiences?

Localisation questions usually focus on the language side of things. What are the core languages should I support to make a difference to my product?

Perhaps a more interesting question, however, is at what stage is it important to translate into less widespread languages like Polish or Finish; or even language variants like Mexican Spanish or Brazilian Portuguese.

Speaking the right language

App stores often favour games that have been localised into many languages, but does a slight increase in the chance of getting featured help make it viable to incur the cost and effort of localisation?

Is your game even suitable for that culturally different audience?

Making a game to appeal to everyone often ends up bland and uninteresting. On the other hand building strong cultural values into your game is a risk. Many Asian players are actively interested in Western games; and vice versa.

However, the playing mechanics and social interactions can be starkly different. The expectations of the different audiences can have a profound impact on how well adopted your game will be in different territories.

Some of the most important risks won't occur to many of us. For example, if you have an avatar system what is the default outfit for your female character? If you use their underwear that will be go down badly in the Middle-East.

How much range is there for your camera control? if you could accidentally look up the skirt of a female avatar in Japan that could cause offence. Even common design concepts can cause problems; skeletons might be great in Mexico but won't go down well in China.

Cultural context matters, but you need to be able to assess which cultural elements create a barrier for your audience and which help differentiate your game from other available content.

That requires effort and if you don't think about this until after you release your game its usually too late.

Going global, thinking local

Considering this early can significantly reduce the level of effort, costs and risks to optimise your game for an international audience.

For example, do you have to use text heavy descriptions to make your game work? Can you communicate what your game is about without words at all?

Think about The Sims and the Simlish language. Its a form of gibberish that allows the game to communicate emotions without having translation problems. Imagine how much it would cost EA to cast and record local speakers in every major language without Simlish.

Thinking locally and globally isn't just about languages and cultural localisation.

We also need to look at how we can use local knowledge to improve our chances of success. Can we trial the game in a local market and use the full range of marketing channels to find our audience and to have the best possible impact on the local games chart

This kind of local thinking needs to extend to the partners you work with. Do you have the contacts with the teams which manage the local versions of the App Store? Do you have the relationships with the local media teams (do we even know if these channels offer any value?) or do you need to find a local publisher or advertising network to work with?

Better yet, can you use tools like Everyplay's gameplay recording to give you local community a chance to share what they love about your game.

Games as a service

All of these relationships matter, but they take effort to manage. What are the legal or commercial barriers to those markets. Does the territory have easy payment mechanisms?

Are there regulations about how you capture data, sell virtual goods or use advertising; especially if your game is played by children.

COPPA compliance is vital in the USA and there are different regulations in the UK and EU we have also to comply with. But with the current hysteria about F2P design its likely we will see new regulations in lots of places that we will have to respond to.

The transition from games standing as one-off products to full-blown services means we have to move towards sustaining our audience's attention for the foreseeable future. We have to continue to support, sustain and deliver content regularly and predictably and also support our audience as well as reacting to local regulations.

This needs locally relevant customer service, community management, 24/7 moderation support, etc.

All of these factors require investment. Maybe not all at the start of the game, but we have to consider what happens if we are successful. What tools or processes do you have to roll-out to deliver new content that's relevant for each local territory?

Biting back

Failing to consider the global and local implications of your game at the concept stage will come back to bite you.

You don't have to have a solution in place when you launch your game, but you need to have an answer to how you will respond if your are lucky enough to succeed and be able to put the necessary partnerships, tools and resources in place quickly enough to make sure that this doesn't kill you nascent business.

Games are global and local and the more we prepare for that the better chance we have to build on any success we might be lucky enough to have.