Keith Russell from Babel talks about TestMyApps.net

keith ross here at the conference to talk about two things i'm from a company called babel and we specialize in qa and localization um but specifically what we're doing here at the conference is launching a new service test my apps and this is specifically aimed at indie developers so it's uh it's a portal that's my apps.net where any developers can go up upload their game we test it on a variety of handsets or we can localize it for them and it's all turned around uh online and they get the reports back in the morning when we get the files back in the morning it's very low price stunningly low priced and that's what we're here at the conference today we come from an environment we've been doing this since 1999 we come from an environment that's very much driven by our connections and and our reputation in the market

et cetera so you know we work with the likes of ea and activision and ubisoft and all those big companies who all know us and come to us for a certain service and then over the years developers started to come to us directly rather than publishers and we started to help them with qa and also their work now in the in the indie scene there's not 10 companies there's not a hundred companies there's a thousand companies um many of them don't know us many of them have not heard of us many of them have not had previous experience with us so it's a it's a fun challenge in how do you message out to a thousand companies this is what we do this is how we can help you yes we work with all the big guys but we also work with two guys in north london that make a brilliant game and that's been very successful and you know we work across all the platforms on mobile in terms of blackberry windows android ios but also tablets and then through into lots of handheld consoles

ps vita right through the console browser games facebook games etc so you know with this company with a huge lot of experience um and a great knowledge that we can help people with but the challenge is how do you tell ten thousand developers what you can do and when you do it i can't meet ten thousand people so events like this where we get a chance to speak we get a chance to sponsor the awards we're sponsoring the beginning pitch uh yesterday it is a chance for us to kind of broadcast out that message so that's what we're here doing big part of our business uh studying for the last five or six years has been asian companies korean japanese companies with their ip wanting to bring it west so what we're doing is going from korean into english um and then we are properly localizing the game and specifically culturalizing the game before we then go on into okay let's go make a french for german

spanish et cetera et cetera version so it's helping them get into the west with the right content it's also giving them advice on how the ui should work and how the in-game mechanics should work even the type of game you know we get approached by the japanese developers we've got chingo games and you're really going to say no they don't really work in the west nobody's going to buy patrick again vice versa a lot of u.s and european developers looking at china looking at korea and thinking well we'll just make a chinese version of our game and it's like we're okay firstly there is multiple types of chinese you know so which version are you talking about uh and also understand that what they expect from the game the type of language that's used in the game again you you targeting at children you targeting your adults and targeting you know teenagers and be very aware that how you localize the game and how the game's perceived even right down to pain localized the little itunes tombstone that talks about your game will impact your sales

i think keeping up with the technology um in terms of platforms you know every day there's a new piece of hardware coming out and we've got to get a hold of that we've got to get it in-house we're going to get our head around how we're going to test on it and how we're going to make it work um language is less so you know we we work pretty actively in about 65 languages so i i don't think many people are going to go beyond that mix um really i guess our biggest challenge right now is is keeping flexible and what i mean by that is everybody's working on a project everybody's trying to get that project to the best possible position before they bring it to market and sometimes they want to hang on to it for another week sometimes they want to hang on to it for another three months sometimes a year um so our job is trying to go okay well we thought we would start in monday but we'll divert those resources to something else and we'll go work with something else while you

finish the game or get further on with the game before you need it so flexibility is probably our biggest challenge right now i think more of the more of the meet and greet scenarios more of the chance where companies like ourselves that have been doing it for a long time that have built up a lot of experience can kind of stand up in front of audiences and say look i'm not here to tell you anything i'm here to give you some advice you know the gray hair that i've got is from being at the bleeding edge for many many years um here are some lessons that have been learned here's also some ways of learning yourself and you know there are a lot of people in the games industry are very generous with their time with their knowledge and it's giving them opportunities to impart that and that will help a lot of the new developers that are coming on board um so yeah more of the kind of maintenance scenarios more of the chances where we can the art knowledge and the park help

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