You said you were going to make games, how did you become the richest man without doing anything?

Chapter 691

In front of the camera, he was wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt, his face looked a little tired, but his eyes were very clear.

"Hello everyone, I am Lu Yu."

"We won't talk about technology or sales today."

"I just want to tell you something."

He paused, his breathing slightly rapid.

"Did you know? Our game has recently received letters and emails from more than seventy countries."

“There was an American girl who said that after playing the second chapter in the mental hospital, she was willing to speak to the caregiver for the first time.”

“A Syrian refugee posted on Reddit that the ‘quit’ button in the game made him decide not to end his life anymore.”

“There was an old man from Argentina who used translation software to type out ten paragraphs just to tell us that he finally understood why he was lonely.”

Lu Yu's voice was a little hoarse.

"We did this not to cure anyone."

"But if it can really accompany you a little further, then we won't have done it in vain."

The barrage in the live broadcast room exploded instantly:
You're not a game studio, you're an emotional repair shop.

Thank you for writing this game, and thank you for not giving up.

My younger brother committed suicide last year. When I finished playing the game, I cried all night.

I am still alive because you told me I could stay.

Lu Yu lowered his head and gently wiped the corner of his eye.

He didn't say anything more, but simply bowed deeply in front of the screen.

In early April, the weather in the capital gradually warmed up.

Lu Yu's studio remains like a deep-sea submarine oblivious to the seasons, blurring the lines between day and night, with light and shadow constantly shifting. Outside the window, the sun shines brightly, while inside, the lights are always on, the alternating blue and white reflections on the computer screen like weaving a never-ending dream.

"Boss! Look at this!"

Old Yu, the planner, burst into the meeting room, iPad in hand. The screen displayed the top trending topic on Twitter, with the headline:
【#PleaseLocalizeDontPlayThisGame】

#Please localize "Don't Play This Game"

Before Lu Yu could react, Lao Yu had already thrown another screenshot onto the big screen.

This is a screenshot from a Reddit forum, with the title:
“This game changed my life. But I had to Google Translate every line.”

"This game changed my life, but I have to use Google Translate for every single sentence."

The top comments below are coming one after another:
【"I'm begging you, devs. Please give us an English patch."】

【"I don't even care if it's MTL. I just want to understand her last words."】

【"I cried at a line I didn't even understand. That's how powerful this game is."】

Lu Yu stared blankly at the comments, his throat feeling like it was blocked, unable to speak for a moment.

He suddenly understood.

They originally thought that the game's emotional appeal could only resonate with players in a Chinese-speaking context.

But the truth is, even with the language barrier, those emotions, that silence, those subtle choices and hesitations still penetrated the cultural divide and struck the hearts of players in distant countries.

And now, they are crying out, pleading, just for understanding.

Even if it's just understanding the last line of a character.

Social media is surging like a tidal wave.

JackGameTheory, a top YouTube gaming channel host, said emotionally during a live stream:
“I don’t understand Chinese, but I played for a full seven hours, relying entirely on the AI ​​translator to take screenshots. I cried three times. Once when the protagonist refused to open the door, once when he picked up the diary in the ruins, and once… when he didn’t say anything and just stood there in the rain.”

He paused, his eyes reddening.

“I don’t know exactly what he said, but I do know that he, like me, had been abandoned.”

The barrage of comments exploded:

"Like him, I relied entirely on translation software to get through the country."

"Please, please release an official English version! I want to recommend it to all my friends."

"Even though I didn't understand it, I still felt the love."

The Steam community review section is completely out of control.

The game's total number of reviews surpassed 100,000 in just three days, with nearly half coming from non-Chinese-speaking regions.

One of the most upvoted comments came from a Spanish player:

"I don't understand your language, but you understand my heart."

Another Brazilian player wrote:
"I used translation software to painstakingly piece together the plot, like piecing together a letter written to me."

Another blind player who played the game using a screen reader left a comment:

“I don’t understand Chinese, but I understood the sound of ‘waiting.’ Thank you.”

In France, "Don't Play This Game" graced the cover of the magazine "Deconstructing Games".

The cover image is a screenshot of a game scene, showing the protagonist standing on a vast, pixelated snowfield, with a line of Chinese characters in the background:
"You can leave, I won't blame you."

The magazine published a special column in Chinese, English, and French, in which commentator Jean-Pierre Serre wrote:

"This is the first time in my life that I have been moved by a game whose language I cannot understand."

It's like a letter without a stamp, transcending language to reach the soul.

German game review website GameStar directly used the headline:

How can a game that doesn't understand German teach us the meaning of 'staying'?

They wrote in their review:

"When the protagonist stops on a broken bridge and quietly looks at the player, I suddenly thought of my father's eyes on his hospital bed."

That unspoken silence needs no translation.

In South Korea, a pinned post on the Naver gaming forum prominently states:

"We need a Korean version. We need more people to see this game."

The post received over 30,000 comments, with players spontaneously forming a translation team to begin unofficial localization.

Some players uploaded screenshots of the game's subtitles and manually translated them line by line in Korean; other fans used AI to synthesize narration dialogue and created commentary videos with subtitles.

Even more remarkably, KimDae, a well-known South Korean streamer, cried while saying during a live broadcast:

“I lost my mother ten years ago. An NPC in the game said, ‘You don’t need to remember me, just remember that you once smiled.’ I broke down.”

In Russia, "Don't play this game" topped the trending searches on the VK platform.

A large number of players spontaneously translated the storyline, analyzed it sentence by sentence in the posts, and some even re-dubbed it in Russian, creating a brand new mod version.

One of the most upvoted comments reads:
"We speak different languages, but we feel the same loneliness."

On Twitch, the most influential platform in the gaming world, an Italian female streamer's stream fell silent for a full minute after she completed the game.

She took off her headphones, tears streaming down her face.

"I don't know what the narrator is saying..."

She choked up, "But I know he has forgiven me."

“I can’t forgive myself, but he forgave me.” That day, her live stream was edited into a video and uploaded to YouTube, where it garnered over a million views.

Lu Yu's team was completely shocked.

They originally just wanted to make a "quiet" game.

I never imagined that it would unleash such a powerful emotional impact despite the language barrier.

Looking at the design document, A-Lu's eyes reddened: "When I first drew the character 'Silent NPC', I just wanted him to be like a person who can't speak... I didn't expect that even if he really can't speak, there would still be people who can understand his heart."

Lin Zhen opened the system backend, and on the data charts, the proportion of overseas players had surged, approaching 60%. Among them, the average game time of non-Chinese native speakers was as high as 7.9 hours, twice that of domestic users.

Old Fish's lips twitched: "They must have been checking the translation while playing... Their efficiency is so impressive that I'd like to send them medals."

Lu Yu sat to the side, his expression complex.

He suddenly realized that they were no longer just a game team from one country.

Their works have become an emotional community across languages.

So they decided to localize it.

This is not simple machine translation, but translation based on **emotional equivalence**.
They assembled a multinational team of translators, screenwriters, linguists, and psychologists. Every line of dialogue had to be re-examined: What was the emotion in the original text? How could it be expressed in the target language while maintaining that tone and that silence?
They even customized specific tone versions for different regions.

such as:

The English narration is more restrained, more like the tone of a psychologist; the Spanish version is warmer, like a mother softly soothing her child to sleep; the French version is more poetic, using a lot of puns and rhythm; the Korean version retains the distinction between honorifics and affectionate language, presenting the tension in the characters' relationships.

In an interview, Lu Yu said:
“We are not translating languages, we are translating ‘choices’.”

"Because this game doesn't speak Chinese."

It said, 'You can stay.'

On the day the localized version was officially launched, Twitter's trending topics were flooded again.

label:

#ThankYouForTranslating
#DontPlayThisGameGlobalVersion
#ICanFinallyUnderstandHer
On Reddit, the American player who once completed the game using Google Translate posted:
"I finally understand that her last words were, 'You can forget me, but I will never forget that you were here.'"

“I cried for a full two minutes.”

In mid-April, on the third day after the multilingual version of "Don't Play This Game" was launched, the number of concurrent online users on global servers exceeded one million.

This is a set of numbers that even Lu Yu himself finds unfamiliar.

It's not because it's too big, but because it's too "real".

These people are no longer just "registered users"; they are listening, waiting, and responding.

Some people came from faraway Algeria, following the internet lines across the desert, and clicked into the game;
Some people came from polar night cities in Northern Europe, lighting up the faint light of pixels during ten hours of darkness;

Some people, from war-torn Ukraine, downloaded this "silent tenderness" on a worn-out tablet in a temporary shelter.

Inside the studio, a multinational video conference is underway.

The screen is divided into three parts: Lu Yu and his team members are in the upper left corner, a localization consultant from Tokyo, Japan is in the upper right corner, and a representative from the Independent Games Association of America is in the lower left corner. He wears round-framed glasses, has gray hair, but is in good spirits.

“I must tell you,” he said in slow, clear English, “that I have been in this industry for thirty years.”

"But this is the first time I've seen a non-English game become a global sensation through pure narrative and emotion, without any marketing budget, trailers, special effects, or celebrity voice acting."

"What you've made... isn't a game."

He paused, his eyes shining.

What you are doing is—an empathy system that transcends language.

Lu Yu bowed slightly and said in a gentle tone, "We just... wrote our own story."

The American representative laughed: "But what you don't know is—what you've written down is actually everyone's story."

One night, Steam received a special email.

The sender is from Palestine.

"When I was 7 years old, my father disappeared because of the war."

In Chapter 5 of the game, I encountered the NPC who couldn't find his way home.

She said, 'I don't know where I should go, but I know I can't stay here.'

At that moment, I cried.

Because that's how I lived too.

"thank you all.

Thank you for writing down the stories I've never told anyone before.

After reading the email, Lu Yu remained silent for a long time.

He printed out the email and posted it on the wall of his studio.

Dozens of paper emails—in Spanish, Korean, French, Arabic, Japanese…—were already densely pasted on top.

They all come from different countries, yet they all say the same thing in their own ways:

"Thank you for writing me down."

On YouTube, a young Nigerian man uploaded a homemade music video.

The background music is the game's ending theme, "You Can Leave".

In the image, a pixelated black boy sits alone in a dilapidated classroom, with war-torn ruins outside the window and a "Don't Play This Game" logo on the wall.

Less than three days after the video was released, it garnered over five million views, and the comment section exploded.

"I cried. This is what I was like when I was a child."

"The world is really all the same; we're all looking for a reason to stay."

"Who says games can't change the world?"

The young man who uploaded the video only wrote one sentence in his bio:

"I don't play games, but I understand this game perfectly."

The global popularity of "Don't Play This Game" has even attracted the attention of UNESCO.

A cultural communications official wrote on the official blog:
"This pixel-style game from China has accomplished a resounding cultural transmission in the quietest way."

"It has no flag, no declaration, yet it makes people all over the world bow their heads and listen to their own heartbeats for a while."

“We are considering including it in the ‘Digital Humanistic Narrative Paradigm’ project.”

Meanwhile, in China, Lu Yu's team began to appear on different stages.

They were invited to participate in Tsinghua University's "Future Narrative Forum";
It was named and recommended by the Ministry of Culture as an "Innovative Case of Chinese Culture Going Global";
Some publishers have even approached them, hoping to compile the game scripts into a book and publish it in multiple languages.

Standing on the podium, Lu Yu addressed the hundreds of students, researchers, and game industry professionals below, and softly said:
"We are not trying to export our culture."

"We are just expressing ourselves."

"And expression is a right that everyone possesses."

He paused, looking out the window at the warm spring sunshine in the distance, "We just use pixels and code."

This "resonance beyond language" has not stopped.

On Facebook, an international gaming community called "Don't Translate, Feel It" has grown rapidly, attracting more than 100,000 players in just two weeks.

They post screenshots of their favorite lines every day, along with their native language translations.

(End of this chapter)