Warhorse Studios Fires Translation Team, Replaces With AI
“Kingdom Come Deliverance is a game about medieval peasants getting treated like garbage by the people in charge. Warhorse just re-enacted the plot with their own staff. You cannot make this up. The irony wrote itself and then got fired.”
Sally's not done with you yet.
Drop a URL, screenshot, or file and Sally will give you the honest truth.
Sally's Take
Warhorse Studios, the developer behind Kingdom Come Deliverance, fired their in-house translation team this week and announced AI tools will handle localization going forward. The stated reason: 'making the company more effective' and 'saving finances'. The translation team found out the same way everyone finds out. An email. On a Tuesday.
This is a studio whose entire brand is historical authenticity. They spent years on period-accurate armor, dialect coaching for actors, and consulting with actual medieval historians. Then they looked at the humans who shaped how 20 languages would experience that authenticity and decided a statistical model could do it for free.
The community reaction is doing what the executives should have predicted. Review bomb campaigns on Steam are already forming. Speedrunners who previously defended the studio are posting their KCD collections on eBay. The goodwill that made KCD a word-of-mouth hit took seven years to build and seventy-two hours to cremate.
Think your work can survive this?
Drop a URL, screenshot, or file and Sally will give you the honest truth.
What Actually Happened
- •Warhorse Studios terminated their entire in-house localization team in early April 2026.
- •Official statement cited 'operational efficiency' and 'financial sustainability' as the reason.
- •AI translation tools will handle all future localization for Kingdom Come Deliverance II and the upcoming third entry.
- •Community backlash began within hours, with review bombing and #BoycottWarhorse trending on X.
Who Got Burned
The dozen-plus translators who got fired, the players who trusted Warhorse to care about craft, and every indie studio that now has to explain to investors why they are not doing the same thing.
Silver Lining
Freelance localizers are suddenly a known scarce resource. Other studios are quietly poaching the fired Warhorse team before their LinkedIn posts hit the algorithm. When a company treats translation like a cost center, the competitors that treat it like craft suddenly look like geniuses.
Your turn. Drop something.
Drop a URL, screenshot, or file and Sally will give you the honest truth.