Services Spotlight: Babel Media

Babel Media prides itself on ensuring that the games you ship are free of show-stopping bugs and breaks. It has been operating for more than 12 years and has built up an impressive list of clients in that time, including Sony Computer Entertainment, Ubisoft, Take-Two and Nintendo. Such is its success that firm was purchased by Keywords Studios in February 2014.

“We know there is no such thing as a ‘standard project’, so we work closely with all our clients to ensure we fully understand their needs, constraints and expectations, making us a logical extension of their own processes,” says CEO Richard Leinfellner.

Babel provides a broad canvas of quality assurance services that include gameplay testing, localisation, audio production, console submission and mobile certification.

“We have been very successful in evolving partnerships and increasing our responsibilities,” says Leinfellner. “In one such case a triple-A publisher initially used Babel just for localisation QA services, based on their own testing strategies. Over a relatively short period of time we successfully expanded the relationship to include advising on game design changes to better cope with the needs of new languages. This resulted in a superior experience and reduced their costs due to a redesigned content pipeline.”

Relatively recently, Babel began to introduce a new, competitively-priced app testing service, called TestMyApps. Through this service, Babel will test mobile games on a huge range of handsets and mail the results directly to the client.

Leinfellner feels that in today’s competitive market developers and publishers should devote all their time to ensuring great gameplay. Of course, time and budgets don’t always make that possible, but, Leinfellner says that Babel’s experience and reliability is why developers should come to them for help.

“We work on more games than any individual client – over 1000 games per year. So by testing more, coupled with great processes and methodologies, we are optimally placed to find issues well before the consumer has a disappointment. We deliver super-quality, however, unlike captive QA groups, you only pay when you need us, and never when you don’t.”