It's no secret that the language support of gog.com is horrible. It has been often discussed, but nothing really seems to change.

Now, I always thought it was a problem with the publishers, who only supplay the English versions of their games to gog.com, but it seems I was wrong.

After I little bit of nagging, I finally got a response from the guys at nordic games (successor of JoWood and rights holder of Gothic, The Guild, Spellforce, ...) about this issue: So, since it seems we need to pressure gog.com into this, I'd like you to discuss this and vote here .

Also, some blue text comments would be very nice.

I question the validity of that response. We've already seen on many occasions that GOG does not produce its own "masters", they only offer what has been provided to them by the IP holders, hence why some games do have multiple language support while others do not.

My impression is that the frequency of releases with more than just one language has increased lately, at least since they started selling newer games a few months ago.

But you're right, the over-all level of multilanguage support is still a let-down. Especially when a game doesn't even support the language it was originally created in.

Yeah, I also think this is an issue that gog has to fix. I mean, the website *could* be in several languages, and definitely some of the games that are english only too.

It depends on the games. I guess if fixes are needed we get only the english versions, like the early Gothic games. Later we got also "younger" games without any big problems known, Still Life or other games from Anuman as example. These games were released multilingual, because there was no need to fix anything and the risk to take support for other language versions is minimal. In the case of nordic games you can get the Gothic Universe (which I believe was released digitally later then the gog versions) and Spellforce multilingual from dotemu. At the moment I'm playing Gothic 1 and I needed to tweak the .ini file, otherwise the game had some issues (crash when saving a game). I believe exactly such situations are the reason why they don't other some games in other languages where they had problems to give support and find the problems in other languages.

What DukemNukemForever says is a possibility, but it can't be the only reason, and I don't see a trend of increasing multi-language support with the newer games either, like Bavarian. I still think the responsibility for lacking multi-language versions is probably equally split between publishers not providing them and GOG either not managing to acquire the rights to them - localisations may be owned by different publishers - or not prioritizing this feature enough (chances are they don't really consider it as that important, what with being an English-language-only website - although you have to give kudos to CDProjekt for The Witcher because that game is probably the one with the best multi-language support available on GOG).

I bet games like Syberia and Still Life have multi-language support regardless of where you buy them, because they were provided that way by the publisher - to me it seems like these games are more or less multi-lingual by design, the multi-language support already included in the package of the original game, while for other games GOG would have to hunt down other versions and make their own multi.lingual package.

Just look at the releases of Sam & Max Season One or The Whispered World for example. Both were only recently released and both are comparatively new games. Of the first, I own the German retail version which comes with voiceovers for at least two different languages and subtitle support for a few more - but the license to that version is owned by Atari, not Telltale. The Whispered World on the other hand was provided by the same company who should have access and rights to the German version, because it's the original one - and it's still not included here. Make of that what you want - unless we don't get any official comment on it, we can only speculate who's responsible for it.

Licensing is indeed another big problem. I believe therer was never a multilingual version of the Whispered World, while the Anuman games came out of the box with multiple languages (got most games of them elsewhere). For me it looks more that GOG doesn't ask for multilingual games, but if they get them they just add the languages to the gamecard. That's the case for many newer games, which seems to be out of the box more multilingual today.

Edit: As example, the version of Tropico 3 and Still Life 2 are on gamersgate are also multilingual while from the Gothic complete pack only the two Arcania games are multilingual and Spellcorce 2 is english only.

I vote, but I believe that they just don't want to publish multi language games.

Legacy of kain defiance has been released and... Surprise!!!... English only. So as no french, german, italian and spanish, no money for Gog. If they want to lose clients and money, perfect for my pocket.

The rest of my opinion here

Post Data: It sucks that "sparrow versions" have multiple languages and Gog no.

I'm very disappointed with language support as well. Most games I own or plan to buy on gog.com are games I already played in the past, and I already know and love the localised version. Even if the translation isn't that great, it's what I remember and want to hear.

I really like gog and favour having all my games at one place, but lack of languages is a major showstopper for me.

Same here, it would make no sense from a business point from GOG's perspective to not add more multilang support in case there's a need for it (to boost sales, for example DoTEmu seems to be big on this part) and should either fall on the hand of the IP holders and/or license issues.