Valve doesn't pay for translators, uses (abuses?) volunteers

Games
#1

The Reddit threads are about some drama with a Valve employee, yadd yadda. The interesting thing is that Valve gets people to do this for $0.

Why pay when people will do it for free, right?

The way STS works is thought to be a free voluntary initiative that any Steam user can join at any moment if they meet some quality requirements. We have never, under any circumstance, been asked to sign a contract. According to Valve, the goal is to help the community by bringing Steam and their games to as many players as possible. I have been on STS for more than 2 years, and there are other translators who have been around for +10 years, even before the STS was created; as this is an unpaid position, you can imagine just about how much money we have saved Valve. If you can’t imagine it, I’ll help: more than 25 languages work every day for Valve, for free.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/44yl24/how_a_whole_language_of_the_steam_translation/cztw1gi

#2

It’s sad I don’t find this surprising.

Translation is not even that expensive.

#3

I wonder how long until Rachel Brown appears. Any guesses?

#4

Rachel Brown?

Oh shit, don’t say it a third time.

#5

RACHEL BROWN!

#6

I don’t see why this is a problem. They’re volunteering. If they don’t enjoy it, stop.

Valve isn’t paying them in any way-- which is what hit EA with the UO Counselors back in the late 90s. EA gave those guys free gametime, so they sued saying they were being under-paid for the job. That was illegal; this isn’t.

#7

Right. You’ll note that I summed up the drama that kicked all of this up with “yadda yadda.” Translation: I have no opinion on the issue of these guys thinking they were going to eventually get something out of this.

I just find it interesting that Valve doesn’t hire translators to work for them.

#8

That’s what I’m not understanding either. It’s not like they were lured in with weasel wording about getting paid. I guess the outrage could be that Valve is relying on volunteers as opposed to just hiring translators to do it, but I thought this was relatively common for game companies. I know Inexile used volunteers to translate Wasteland 2 for example since I know someone who was doing it, which was unpaid apart from a pat on the back.

Edit: And here’s some Pillars of Eternity volunteer translating. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/obsidian/project-eternity/posts/1471588

#9

I do, I think they’re fools! My assumption is most of them never expected anything, they were doing it out of true altruism. Altruism is real, not just a concept, otherwise free open-source software wouldn’t exist. I don’t understand why anyone would volunteer for a commercial company like Valve, but then I don’t understand lots of things. I don’t understand women’s shoes.

You need to be very careful leveraging your enthusiastic userbase to work for free, as EA demonstrated back in 2000 with that lawsuit. But it sounds like Valve did it right.

#10

They also rely on the community to actually make TF2 work and generate money through all the content they’ve created. To be honest, it’s genius, and something I’m sure most companies wish they could do. Having your audience generate their own content and then pay you for it? Christ alive, what business (gaming or otherwise) wouldn’t like that?

#11

This is where I’m coming from mostly. I love gaming, but if EA, Activision, or Ubisoft asked me to work for free, I’d tell them to eat it. Same goes with Valve.

It’s one thing if you’re excited about a buddy’s indie greenlight project and you want to chip in to get that game done, but multi-million dollar publishers? Pffft. Nah.

#12

My point was more about quality control and accountability. Valve is always very interesting (and efficient) in its business behavior, but I would dread having some unlicensed translator that I don’t know how to thrust putting content out there. this is in line with Valve going towards outsourcing/ceding control to the community in many areas.

It feels weird they are saving here, when it affects the front end of their business and it’s not something that costs too much to get done with guarantees.

#13

Yeah… I actually thought about having some of my games translated, but then again, if someone translated it to German or Polish or something, I wouldn’t have any idea what it actually said before I published it publicly! I certainly wouldn’t do this volunteer route if I were a million-dollar entity like Valve.

#14

Regardless of what Vale promised or didn’t promise them (sounds like they promised nothing), this certainly doesn’t improve my view of the company.

#15

I can see some people doing volunteer work with the hope that it might somehow transition into a paid position. It could also be something you could put on a resume that could be helpful if you were angling for a translating position at another company.

I can also see someone doing volunteer work if the workload was really light. Maybe the translating amounts to just an hour or two a week?

#16

They do have paid employees handling localization also, the volunteers mean they need a lot less of those people, as their job is more QA than actual production.

#17

Workshop creators get 25% of revenue from their items, so they aren’t volunteers. Compare the 75% of revenue Valve pockets from user-submitted items to the 30% of revenue they pocket from games sold on Steam.

#18

But it’s a flat meritocracy!

#19

User-created content is a great racket, agreed, but again-- nobody put a gun to those peoples’ heads and forced them to model hats. They would probably be doing it anyway out of love for the game, just like all the other titles like Skyrim. It would be nice if Valve took a 30% cut rather than 75%-- but I don’t have a moral objection to their business model there either.

#20

Neither do I, you could say that Valve did much more of the leg-work on creating a fantastic game that tens of thousands of people still play compared to setting up a digital storefront.