In this empirical study we examine three different translation modes with varying involvement of machine translation (MT) post-editing (PE) when translating video game texts. The three translation modes are translation from scratch without MT, full PE of MT output in a static way, and flexible PE as a combination of translation from scratch and post-editing of only those machine-translated sentences deemed useful by the translator. Data generation took place at the home offices of freelance game translators. In a mixed-methods approach, quantitative data was generated through keylogging, eye tracking, error annotation, and user experience questionnaires as well as qualitative data through interviews. Results show a negative perception of PE and suggest that translators’ user experience is positive when translating from scratch, neutral with a positive tendency when doing flexible PE of domain-adapted MT output and negative with static PE of generic MT output.