Regionalism has been one of the buzzier words in gaming this year. You see it in the excitement over culturally rooted blockbusters like Black Myth: Wukong or Stellar Blade. You also see it in the less flashy, behind-the-scenes push to win over players in markets like South Korea, Brazil, China, and Kenya.
Gilles Langourieux, CEO of Virtuos, thinks the industry hasn’t pushed far enough. At DICE 2025, not long after announcing Virtuos had acquired Umanaïa, Pipeworks, and Abstraction, he pitched something more radical than swapping a few assets for localization. His idea: make different versions of a game for different parts of the world, built from the ground up for local tastes.
Players bump into this sort of thing outside gaming too. Quick Google search for something like “how to find an offshore casino” and they will find examples of platforms changing game libraries, payment options, and even interface layouts to meet local laws and audience habits.
Not Just a New Skin on an Old Idea
None of this is brand new. In 1989, Dynamix released MechWarrior for U.S. MS-DOS players and a different-looking edition for Japan’s PC-98 crowd. The core game didn’t change much, but the UI, the mission-complete screen, even the general vibe, all tuned to local preferences.
In the years since, plenty of publishers have done the same for a mix of cultural and regulatory reasons. Krafton made Battlegrounds Mobile India after PUBG Mobile was banned in the country. World of Warcraft has adjusted character designs to suit local standards. Nier Replicant and its international sibling Nier Gestalt even swapped characters and storylines.
Langourieux’s pitch is to go beyond those surface edits. He’s talking about building unique missions, modes, even mechanics, changes deep enough that one market’s version of a game might feel genuinely different from another’s.
Borrowing From Other Entertainment Models
He’s fond of comparing games to film production, though not for the reasons you’d expect. “The bad thing about the movie industry is you can only make one movie for everyone,” he said. “In games, we can make different games for different people, but too few studios take advantage of that.”
What he does like about film is the way crews scale up and down as needed. Game studios tend to hold a steady headcount from start to finish, which often leads to dead time for some staff and layoffs for others. The remote and distributed workflows the pandemic forced on the industry? He sees those as a way to break that pattern, and maybe make parallel, region-specific development a real option.
Some publishers in Asia, like Garena and Nexon, are already doing this more aggressively. In the West, it’s still rare.
Why Live Service Games Could Lead the Way
If there’s one type of game built for this, it’s live service. Regular updates mean it’s easier to drop in region-specific content. And even single-player games are drifting in that direction. Vampire Survivors has seasonal crossover packs. Early Access projects like 9 Kings roll out new features every few months.
Done right, a studio could release a Latin America–themed event one quarter and a Southeast Asia–focused expansion the next. It’s the kind of approach that might stick in regions where PC and mobile audiences are growing fast.
The Catch
It’s not all upside down. Without people from the actual market involved, regional tweaks can come off as tone-deaf. And in some countries, rules around depicting characters, women, or minorities could force changes that anger other audiences.
The industry’s been here before. Scaling up this approach will only raise the stakes.
A Flexible Future
Langourieux’s point is simple: games can do this in a way other media can’t. You can push a new build worldwide in days. Swap out assets. Rewrite code. Film can’t shoot five different endings for five markets without blowing the budget. TV can’t rewrite half a season for one territory.
Whether this becomes the norm is another question. Big publishers chasing global audiences might see the return. Smaller studios may decide it’s not worth the cost.
The capability is there. The audience is there. The challenge is whether studios will use it, and whether they’ll do it with enough care to make it feel like more than a marketing gimmick.
