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MOBA titles are the top-marketing priority for English-language game developers, according to a new report from online translation agency One Hour Translation. Whereas MOBA, MMO and MMORPG translation projects made up just 22 per cent of all game translations in 2016, that figure has since jumped to 54 per cent this year, showing a growth of 32 per cent year-on-year.
The next most popular genre was strategy games, with a 27 per cent share in 2017, but this was down on 2016’s figure of 34 per cent. Next up were classic titles, which also fell from 16 per cent in 2016 to 11 per cent in 2017, while FPS and RPG games took just three per cent in 2017. Sports were the least popular, with just 1.5 per cent share of the total number of projects. To put that in context, One Hour Translation’s research covered 9,550 translation projects of around 2,000 titles.
"The dominance of the MOBA and MMO game categories in the marketing and localization efforts of English-speaking video game developers is in line with the trends found by market research studies in the digital gaming field," the report stated.
Indeed, a study from Juniper Research in April earlier this year stated that the volume of MOBA games is expected to account for 25 per cent of the $100bn digital gaming market by the end of 2017. By 2021, it predicted that MOBA and MMO games would reach a global market volume of $43bn –around a third of the digital games market.
In terms of language breakdown, English is the most popular, followed by German, French, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, Russian, Turkish, Korean and Swedish.
Founded in 2008, One Hour Translation is the largest online translation agency in the world, with over 15,000 translators spread across 100 countries providing services for 75 languages and 2,500 language pairs. It serves more than 60 per cent of Fortune 500 companies, including Microsoft and Amazon.
