Some of the translations proposed by these “experts in the French language enrichment device” seem quite natural or even already commonplace, such as the fact of writing “early access” instead of early access“seasonal pass” instead of season pass or even “professional player” instead of gamer. Others sound pretty good, like just saying “retrogame” instead of retrogaming. The translation of hardcore gamers in “hyperplayers”, which face “casual gamers” is not so badly found either. Commendable effort also for the term matchmaking which could become “player pairing” with a bit of goodwill.
On the other hand, it would be necessary to get rid of habits that are a little too entrenched to imagine the acronym CTA (additional downloadable content) replacing the traditional DLC (downloadable content). Ditto to eject the very universal eSports for the benefit of “competitive video games” or ask streamers to become “live players”, a questionable translation to say the least. Also complicated to replace the already too well installed cloud gaming by “cloud video game” even if the Quebec office of the French language has encouraged the use of a term like “cloud computing” since 2010.
But the most regrettable is that we still do not have an ideal and immediately understandable equivalent at the end game as a service, often translated literally as “game as a service” or more simply as “game service”. For French language experts, the recommended translation here is “video game on demand”, a proposition that seems to stem from a misunderstanding of the subject. A notion that is certainly recent and whose definition remains quite fluid, but which above all designates a game whose economic model is designed to bring in money over a long period of time.
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