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Comment by maficious | Hacker News Reader

How is it not applicable when the thing at question is rendering text and rendering is the core of game development? This argument is stupid. Do you have to be a slowpoke to develop commercial apps?

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My point is that a UI that meets the needs of as many users as possible, including things like internationalization and accessibility, is much more complex than a typical game UI. That complexity drives developers to use abstractions that often make it much more difficult to optimize. And in the big picture, support for these things that add complexity is often more important than top-speed rendering.

Games are typically much better at internationalization and accessibility than developer tooling though. For example this new windows console doesn't have either, but all big games gets translated to and handles text from languages all over the world.

Video games often have an international audience and go to great lengths to support accessibility and multiplatform support, ie. supporting both tablet and desktop. It's laughable how bad many enterprise UIs are that fail to handle different locales, or issues displaying right-to-left text and assuming everyone is using an English speaking standard desktop environment, whereas many indie games manage to handle these things very well.

Can't recall when it was the last time I played game with no internationalization support

Games usually handle internationalization and accessibility much better than most software.

This includes audio localization (something no 'Enterprise' software has ever needed AFAIK), and multiple colour palettes for different types of colour blindness.

Sometimes video games are the only software with reasonable localizations I ever find installed in a particular computer.

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