A mechanic for foreign language announcers

[ArcheoOutOfNowhere]

Hey !

 

While thinking about who to hire as my commentary team for my save, it gave me an idea for future games. As of now, and to the best of my knowledge, foreign broadcasters and even fans don't really care who you have as your commentary team.

So, most of the time, real world mods will either have the most famous foreign language announcers/color commentators have a contract with the company, for realism sake, or not care at all. Yet, as a French speaker, I can testify how important those workers can be: as a teenager, my knowledge of English was far from being enough to understand what was going on, and the French duo of Agius and Chereau made me interested in following WWE, while the couple of other companies I could see on TV made me think "It's not for me" and it took a long time before I realised how much I missed (since I could now understand the promos and announcers). And I can only imagine how many people got into some companies (NJPW, AAA, etc) once they had someone talking to them in their own language.

 

My suggestion would therefore be this: each company would have their usual commentary team for their shows (as it is currently, with small companies only having one while those with TV shows and PPV can have multiple ones). But there would be a new layer of complexity for it whenever a company signed with a broadcaster that does not air in the same language the company uses, and not having a line-up for other languages would significantly hurt the popularity growth. For instance, if you're playing with WWE in a real world mod, you wouldn't gain as much popularity in Mexico if you do not have a Spanish-speaking announce table, nor would you be able to infiltrate Quebec and Western Europe as easily without a French-speaking one.

 

On the broadcaster side of the problem, some would refuse to negotiate with you or end the contract if you don't promise to (and then) find announcers in their language, while others would offer to provide them (with then a couple of workers created on the spot, and the risks they would be absolutely awful). And obviously, there also would be some who would not care at all, and just send money your way. They could even demand other stuff (like "We only want babyfaces", or "We'd like to have a former wrestler" or "We'd like for one to be a woman"), or offer to share the costs.

 

And on the plus side, while it would indeed add more work for mod makers and players, there would also be positive aspects: it would provide you with incentives to have bidding wars for announcers, give you an out for workers that aren't that useful in the ring anymore but you want to keep for sentimental or financial reasons or even have a use for injured workers that you don't want to pay for nothing.

Having a particularly good line-up for one of the foreign languages, or a former huge star in that region would also give you with a bonus of popularity growth and make it easier to get better deals with broadcasters.

Perhaps we could even have tiny bonuses when negotiating with workers as they would rather sign with the company they could more easily follow, or a higher chance of foreign workers in your training facilities (the quality of which might be even a tiny bit better since it's easier to tempt talented trainees to become wrestlers in your company if they became fans as a teenager).

And obviously, you could always choose not to expand in those regions, as you don't actually need to hit global to have fun (and it wouldn't be impossible anyway, just much slower)