Beyond Borders: How Industry Veteran Kate Edwards is Redefining Culturalisation for Games of All Sizes

After three decades of navigating the complex intersections of geography, culture, and digital entertainment, Kate Edwards remains one of the video game industry’s most trusted authorities on global release strategy. Having originally established Microsoft’s geopolitical strategy team before moving on to found Geogrify—a specialized consultancy dedicated to content culturalisation—Edwards has spent her career advising studios ranging from solo indie developers up to massive triple-A powerhouses. Her most recent blockbuster endeavor saw her spend three years lending her expertise to MachineGames and Bethesda as a culturalisation advisor on Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.

Yet, despite her extensive work on some of the largest intellectual properties in modern interactive entertainment, Edwards’ focus has increasingly shifted toward an underserved demographic: smaller mobile and independent development teams operating on tight constraints. Speaking candidly about the realities of global publishing, Edwards breaks down why small teams can successfully manage culturalisation on a budget, why the concept of a globally neutral map is an administrative myth, and why playing it safe creatively is rarely the same as getting cultural representation right.

The Closer to Reality, the Higher the Stakes

At the core of Edwards’ philosophy is the principle of "allegorical distance," a framework that measures how closely a fictional setting or narrative invites comparison with the real world. According to Edwards, the tighter the connection between a game’s universe and recognizable geography, contemporary cultures, organized religions, political conflicts, or historical eras, the higher the baseline expectation for accuracy among players. Crucially, it also raises the potential fallout of getting things wrong.

While this principle is often discussed in the context of major historical epics or sprawling open-world adventures, Edwards emphasizes that it applies equally to small teams working on intimate projects. Whether a game is built by a thousand developers or a team of three, players bring their own lived experiences to the screen. When a fictional world borrows heavily from real-world aesthetics, it makes implicit promises to its audience about respect and authenticity.

A Pragmatic, Three-Step Approach for Small Teams

For independent and mobile developers working with limited resources, the prospect of global cultural research can feel overwhelming. However, Edwards argues that effective culturalisation does not require a massive budget or an army of legal advisors. Instead, she outlines a minimum viable process designed specifically for smaller studios.

The approach begins with prioritization. Developers do not need to vet every individual texture, background prop, or ambient sound asset in their game. Instead, they must identify the handful of foundational cultural elements that carry narrative or interactive weight—the specific components that players are genuinely going to notice and interpret.

Once those key elements are isolated, the second step requires thorough research utilizing sources originating from within the represented culture itself, rather than relying on internal assumptions or pop-culture tropes. Finally, the process relies on external validation, requiring studios to bring in at least one knowledgeable individual from that specific cultural background to review the work while the project is still malleable enough to accommodate changes.

According to Edwards, achieving this level of authenticity is largely a matter of mindset rather than expenditure. Studios do not need a blank check to get things right; they need intentionality, basic research discipline, and an extra pair of culturally informed eyes, consulted as early in the development pipeline as possible.

Culturalisation is Cheaper Than Its Reputation

Within the wider games industry, culturalisation has frequently been categorized as an expensive, late-stage luxury reserved exclusively for major publishers with deep pockets. Edwards pushes back firmly against this reputation, noting that the practice is far more affordable when it is integrated into a project from its earliest stages.

Rather than commissioning massive overhauls post-production, meaningful culturalisation can often consist of just a few hours of specialist consultation during the initial concept phase, paired with targeted research and one or two expert reviewers. Edwards notes that she has worked with several indie projects that successfully leveraged an hour or two of a university professor’s time, an intervention that fundamentally corrected their trajectory without straining their finances.

The real financial burden, Edwards explains, always stems from procrastination. The expensive version of culturalisation involves discovering a fundamental cultural misstep only after assets have been fully rendered, dialogue has been recorded, marketing campaigns have launched, and the game has been formally announced to the public. Remedying an oversight at that stage requires dismantling sunk costs, whereas addressing it during pre-production requires only a shift in perspective.

When There is No Right Answer

Navigating international markets often presents developers with regulatory paradoxes that have no clean artistic solutions. Countries such as China and India, for instance, enforce strict legal frameworks regarding the depiction of disputed territories and national borders. Because of these laws, a single map asset can easily be deemed completely unacceptable in one major market while being mandatory in another.

Governments, Edwards points out, do not view maps simply as artistic set dressing or neutral navigation tools; they treat cartography as a formal political assertion of sovereignty.

For developers facing these geopolitical realities, Edwards advises identifying which target markets have binding legal requirements, understanding the exact scope of those regulations, and building regional variants where possible. However, if maintaining multiple versions of a map or asset is not feasible due to technical or financial constraints, developers must be willing to question the fundamental premise of the content itself.

Sometimes, Edwards notes, the single best culturalisation solution is not figuring out how to alter the content to appease multiple conflicting authorities, but rather asking why that specific content needs to be included in the game at all.

Defensible, or Good?

In earlier years, Edwards was typically brought onto projects to protect the creative intent of developers as their games crossed international borders. While that advocacy remains a core part of her consultancy work, she has noticed a significant shift in the anxieties plaguing modern studios. Today, she hears a different primary concern from creators worried about public scrutiny: if someone attacks a design decision on social media, will the studio be able to effectively explain why they made it?

Edwards understands the underlying fear. In the era of rapid digital discourse, social media can reduce months of thoughtful creative work into a single out-of-context screenshot and a wave of public condemnation within a matter of hours. Yet, she remains cautious about where this anxiety leads the industry.

Her primary concern is the rise of a purely defensive approach to culturalisation, where the ultimate goal of a development team becomes crafting a product that no individual could possibly find objectionable. Such an outcome, she argues, is neither realistic nor creatively healthy. Virtually any successful cultural artifact—whether a film, a novel, or a video game—carries the potential to challenge, provoke, or upset someone somewhere.

Rather than practicing risk avoidance designed to achieve universal placation, Edwards advocates for cultural resilience. Studios should do their homework, genuinely understand the audiences they are depicting, recognize where genuine risks lie, document the reasoning behind their choices, and ultimately stand behind their creative decisions.

Consistency Over Maximum Realism

Another common pitfall Edwards observes in game development is not overt offensiveness, but rather internal inconsistency. Studios frequently stumble by mixing incompatible world-building rules, such as pairing hyper-realistic geography with heavily fictionalized, stereotypical cultures, or vice versa.

Reflecting on her three-year tenure advising on Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Edwards points to the project as a successful example of establishing clear world-building boundaries. The development team at MachineGames understood precisely where real-world history ended and the distinct pulp-adventure mythology of Indiana Jones began, grounding their 1930s adventure in authentic real-world locations while allowing room for the supernatural archaeology inherent to the franchise.

Players, Edwards explains, are remarkably adaptable and quick to understand the internal logic of a fictional world, provided those rules are established early and maintained consistently. Problems inevitably arise when a game signals to the player that a specific environment is historically accurate and authentic, only to suddenly pivot to entirely different rules without explanation. Good culturalisation, therefore, is not necessarily about achieving maximum realism; it is about maintaining coherence between the reality the studio has borrowed and the fiction they have built on top of it.

The Evolution of the Handbook and the Startup Experience

For years, developers have inquired about the comprehensive culturalisation handbook Edwards has frequently promised to author. The delay, she admits with a smile, comes down to an evolving target audience. While the material initially targeted triple-A production pipelines, Edwards realized that the creators who need the guidance most are those operating without dedicated geopolitical teams, localization departments, or legal budgets.

Rather than writing a massive 500-page encyclopedia cataloging what is considered offensive across every nation on Earth—a document that would become obsolete almost as soon as it was published—she aims to teach developers how to ask better questions during the creative process.

Alongside her ongoing consulting work, Edwards has also experienced the other side of the desk through her involvement in building and funding SetJetters, a screen-tourism app that maps real-world filming and game locations in partnership with organizations like Visit West. Transitioning into startup leadership has provided an educational and occasionally humbling shift in perspective. While a consultant can identify an ideal solution from an outside vantage point, a startup founder must constantly balance that ideal solution against competing demands for limited money, engineering hours, and attention.

Fundraising, too, offered a stark lesson in the linguistic divide between creators and investors. While creators naturally speak in terms of narrative, craft, and product experience, investors evaluate value through the lenses of scalability, customer acquisition cost, retention metrics, and long-term revenue.

More broadly, building the app has inverted her professional worldview. After spending three decades analyzing how entertainment moves across cultures, she is now exploring the reverse phenomenon: what happens when entertainment inspires people to physically traverse the globe, forging an emotional relationship with a digital landscape that compels them to experience it in reality.