Jagex and their Downhill Logic

Guten Tag, boys and girls!

Now, I’ve seen the German update coming for quite some time after glancing at their corporate site. Though I speak German fluently, I want to let you know one thing: I will not play the German RS. I have a few reasons for doing this and I’ll list them:

- I can’t get used to the new “vocabulary” after playing for so long. If I say “buying restore pots”, I’m always going to say it and I prefer everyone else did.
- I do not feel that the language in-game carries over in the same style as it does in English. If I were fluent in Greek and given the chance to read a great work of art in that language, I’d prefer that over reading it in its original format rather than relying on the translation of another individual.
- I rather be “on the same page” as my friends when it comes to quests and such.

Now, I realise that there are other people who would be more comfortable in playing the game in German but I don’t see the vast masses begging for it. In fact, I have never met a German person on Runescape. I haven’t ever spoken German on Runescape.

Let’s say for a moment that Jagex had an idea behind their move to translate RS into German. Here are a few reasons why they might have done it:

- There are interested in marketing the game in Germany, Austria, Lichtenstein, Luxembourg, and Switzerland.
- They feel that German might be a unifying language for Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, and Polish members since some of these members might have learned the language in school.
- Andrew and Paul Gower are sentimental over their long lost German uncle

If they were interested in marketing the game in the aforementioned countries, basic marketing tells you that it’s wiser to appeal to a growing minority if you want to capitalise on a product. Well, I can almost assuredly tell you that German-speaking RS-ers are not a quickly-growing minority by the fact that German fan sites are nearly nonexistent. There exist no German servers, nor any notable German-speaking clans. Runescape has a diverse pool of players, but Germany simply isn’t prevalent in this population.

There could also be the chance that Jagex assume that their Western European members may already know German and that they are making it easier for them by presenting the game in that language. I’ve talked to two players from the Netherlands, one player from Finland, and and have researched Swedish education, I have come to a conclusion that these children are more exposed to education in English as a second language than German. The two Dutch players I talked to knew a proficient amount of German, while the Finnish player didn’t know any. Despite being proficient in German, I do not think (please correct me if I’m wrong) that any player would go through the difficulty of switching languages on RS.

Fan sites predominantly display quest guides/game info into English, with a few translated in Dutch, Swedish, or French. Any player who was German would be out of luck if they didn’t speak any of these languages. Any other player who was playing the German version “for the fun of it” would have to adapt to reading guides in English and re-translating the information into the game. This is just cumbersome and I see the German version of RS becoming as temporarily popular as Keldagrim (not to mention almost all of the northern RS territories) upon release.

To put it all together, I feel that Jagex (once again) denies its fan-base. They choose an essentially useless language to provide support to a small percentage of users while leaving the majority in the dark when it comes to support queries and gameplay. This decision has no ground and Jagex has yet to explain its reasoning.