This month Gramek has jumped out of the corner and proposed us a topic of the month: EVE Online in times of globalization. In my opinion, a very exciting topic.
But has EVE Online really changed that much in times of globalization? I’ll try to explain here what influence globalization had on our game, or where EVE Online was even ahead of globalization.
When I started with EVE Online, there was the game in one language, the website in one language and the forum in one language – English. Most of the content from the community was also in English. Only the pilot manual and some blogs were the exception.
But even then, without English you didn’t get far. In the meantime, EVE Online is available in a wide variety of languages, with Japanese being the latest addition. Here CCP has positioned itself much more broadly. On the other hand, there are players who have great difficulties with English. My alliance is mainly Russian and there are members who can only speak Russian. That was unthinkable before localization. Whereby I exclude here the initial times of the localization… “machine of the last judgement”.
But even though localization is now in place and relatively good, English is still ubiquitous. I always start conversations in English, unless the profile gives a different hint. You usually do quite well with that. Sometimes it’s funny to find out after 30 minutes that the person you’re talking to also speaks German.
My personally most surprising experience with globalization in EVE Online was a random conversation with another player. After a few sentences he told me that he lives in Namibia. We then talked for over an hour about his and his country’s situation and the (massive) impact of Corona. It is conversations like this that make EVE Online a truly globalized game for me. We are all united by our interest in EVE Online. The origin, profession or whatever is not important.
