Video game localization (or computer game localisation), is the process of preparing a video game for a market outside of where it was originally published. The game's name, art assets, packaging, manuals, and cultural and legal differences are typically altered.

Before localization, producers consider economic factors such as potential foreign profit. Most official localizations are done by the game's developers or a third-party translation company. Nevertheless, fan localizations are also popular.

Localization is largely inconsistent between platforms, engines and companies due to its recency. Localizers intend to create an experience like the original game, with discretion to the localization audience. Localizations are considered to have failed if they are confusing or difficult to understand and this may break the player's immersion.

Since the beginning of video game history, video games have been localized. One of the first widely popular video games, Pac-Man was localized from Japanese. The original transliteration of the Japanese title would be "Puck-Man", but the decision was made to change the name when the game was imported to the United States out of fear that the word 'Puck' would be vandalized into an obscenity. In addition, the names of the ghosts were originally based on colors - roughly translating to "Reddie", "Pinky", "Bluey", and "Slowly". Rather than translate these names exactly, they were renamed to Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde. This choice maintained the odd-man-out style of the original names without adhering to their exact meaning. This is an early example of a change in cultural context.

Early localization had one main concern. Due to the small memory size of the NES and SNES cartridges many translated text strings were too long. Ted Woolsey, translator of Final Fantasy VI, recounts having to continually cut down the English text due to limited capacity.

Early video game translation was not often a priority for companies, leading to budgets being low and localization time being cut short. Early translations were sometimes "literally done by a 'programmer with a phrase book'". For example, the original translation for the Sega Genesis game Beyond Oasis was discarded as the editor considered it nonsensical and an entirely new story was rewritten without any input from the translator. Occasionally the poor translation of video games has made the game notable. An example of this is with the game Zero Wing whose Engrish text "All Your Base Are Belong to Us" became an early Internet meme.

As technology in the early 2000s improved, localization was made both easier and harder. These improvements made in technology allowed text to be stored in ASCII strings instead of in picture format. Audio processing capability also improved allowing voice acting to be included in video games. The addition of dubbing into video games made the localization process harder and localization producers had to choose if they wanted to record entirely new voice lines or keep the original voice over. Graphical capability also improved making games more cinematic, so making sure the newly recorded voice lines matched the lip movements of the characters was important. Also, ensuring that visual gestures of animated characters made sense to a different audience was important.

Modern video games are becoming increasingly complex in scope. As opposed to their older counterparts, video games can have a large amount of dialogue and voice over, making localization efforts significantly harder. The team in charge of localizing Fable II into five languages consisted of 270 actors and 130 personnel. Likewise, the dialogue scripts for Star Wars: The Old Republic contained over 200,000 lines. Director of audio and localization Shauna Perry said that the game had as much audio as ten Knights of the Old Republic recorded back-to-back.