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Okay, enough is enough. No more "controversy" talk anymore, it's eclipsing the original topic of the thread. Almost 3+ pages of arguing? Nah. Take it to PM's if you guys desperately need to hash things out past this point.

Thank you! Lamunation appealed to me because of the art style (I loooove muku's art), and because I think the content could be a hit not only with people who are already into visual novels, but also with other people who are new to the genre. For our first project, we wanted to go with something a bit crazy and different that could get our name out there to a wide potential audience. Also the writer/developer, kepposhi, is a really cool guy who was very enthusiastic about working with us! And yes, we hope to translate other visual novels after this! But it really depends on how this first project goes. If it sells well, then we can invest the profits into getting more licenses Nope! We're funding this ourselves. Yes, we will be keeping the mosaics as the game was never designed to be uncensored. We may consider un-mosaiced releases in the future.

So just to give an update: I finished translating Saint Irene/Lavria's chapter (Chapter 3) last Friday ^^. Just didn't get to post an update here until now. Next up would be Chapter 4 (Licia's chapter), and this is going to be the longest chapter to translate with about 12500 lines, so yeah, it's going to take me quite a while to finish translating this. As for partial patch-wise, I'm still doing final checks on Chapter 2 (Eris' chapter) before handing it to QC. QC on Prologue and Chapter 1 (Fione's chapter) is more or less done, so just Eris' chapter left and some final checks before we release the partial patch

Lamunation! is out Now! Here are the links to the shops! Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1025140/LAMUNATION_international/ JastUSA: https://jastusa.com/lamunation-international Mangagamer: https://www.mangagamer.com/r18/detail.php?goods_type=1&product_code=1154 Denpasoft: https://denpasoft.com/collections/newest-releases/products/lamunation Original Post: Love Lab announced an English translation of Lamunation! for Q1 of 2019. Here is their announcement: And here is their web page: https://www.lovelabjapan.com/lamunation-announcement/ They confirmed an All-Age release with an free 18+ patch. I personally have never heard of Love Lab before, but the hired known translator Blickwinkel for this translation, so at least we don't have to fear a MTL. Here is the opening: @Clephas wrote on his blog here about the title and described it as 'random/comedy/ecchi' Here is the link to his blog post: So we have another new entry to the translation scene. I wish them good luck and hope their release is good. The title at least looks interesting if you enjoy comedy.

I finished Umineko's first episode and Beatrice's dojo () and man was it fun. I think I'm supposed to rack my brains with this VN, so let's start the guessing game as early as now. Warning, Umineko spoilers ahead, obviously, but also some from Higurashi and Ever17.

Oh don't worry, once i lobotomize him, he won't say that anymore.

Basically some art is more... detailed underneath the mosaics than others. Some artists don't draw detailed genitalia if they know that no one is ever going to see it. In this case, it would require substantial image editing on our end to make the mosaic-free images pleasing to look at. Another factor is that our company is based in Japan, and therefore has to adhere to Japanese laws. My comment about de-mosaiced releases was for any potential future games we work on. It's not completely off the table, but not something we can offer at this point in time or with this particular title. I know there are a lot of people who will only buy releases without mosaics, but I'm afraid that's just not something we can do right now.

Time to replay this great game, this time with the limited run Vita edition! @Templarseeker

For context, my Normal mode clear took 223 turns. Hard mode likely wouldn't have taken much longer. You'd have to be stalling on purpose to hit that turn limit.

Well, there is an overall time limit of 999 turns to finish the entire game, but there are no sectioned off time limits that will give you an instant game over during any particular section.

度(ど) is a counter for degrees, and 分(ぶ) is a counter for tenths of a degree. So 6度4分 is 6.4 degrees. If the units aren't mentioned in the text, it's generally safe to assume they mean Celsius.

I'm so lonely here lately... Still, I have a small update about a tiny semi-hiatus of the external blog and my plans for the future. Also, I think I finally made my site into something that is not completely hideous, even if it's far, far from being perfect. I hope. You'll be the judge of that. http://evnchronicles.blogspot.com/2018/09/vacations-state-of-blog-update.html

Wow... I wanted to do some more (uncoordinated and self-inspired) shilling for this campaign but I guess I'll wait to not get associated with this.

To what extent do JVN and EVN fans on Steam overlap? How many VNs do they buy? Who spends more? Which fandom is more elitist? As an update to my last analysis post on VN sales on Steam, I trawled 100k Steam profiles to find out. Here are my results~ Data collection and definitions Using the Steam API, I checked over a million steam profiles and collected public game lists on just under 100k users. I then used Steam's "Visual Novel" tag to identify which of those games were VNs. As Steam tends to be more lax on its definition of what a VN is, I cross-referenced this with VNDB.org and only included those games that had a VNDB entry. VNs were then split into three categories: JVNs: non-free VNs created by a Japanese company. EVNs: non-free VNs created by a primarily English speaking developer. Free VNs: free VNs created by either a Japanese or English developer. Unlike the non-free categories, users are only counted as "owning" a free VN if they have logged some time playing it. Those of you who follow my twitter may notice a few of these graphs are different to what I teased earlier. When investigating the overlap between VNs, I consistently found one group of VNs that were an outlier in terms of their fanbase overlap with other VNs, their userbase size, and their average price. It was always the Chinese and Russian VNs. So in the interests of better analysing the English language VN fandom, I restricted the dataset to only those VNs developed originally in English or Japanese. Results Let’s start simple and just see how widespread we VN fans are on Steam: While VNs remain a niche, they seem to be widespread enough among the Steam userbase that most users should at least be familiar with what they are. EVNs are penetrating Steam better than JVNs, perhaps due to bundles and lower prices. But they’ve also been on Steam longer than JVNs, with Analogue: A Hate Story being released back in 2012. Overall, 37.9% of Steam users either own or have played a VN of some kind. But owning one VN doesn’t necessarily make you a fan, so let’s see how many VNs these users own. The dramatic drop for free VNs show how dependent it is on a few VNs that reach more mainstream attention. 26.5% of free VN users have only played Doki Doki Literature Club for example, and only 53.2% of free VN players have ever bought a VN. This suggests that free VNs might not be an effective strategy for promoting a later commercial release as so few of these users buy VNs. EVNs drop at a faster rate than JVNs, showing that EVNs’ wider userbase doesn’t necessarily mean they have more users who would identify as VN fans as they tend to only own a couple of VNs. However once we get past the casual crowd, we see EVN owners seem to be more prolific purchasers than JVN owners. EVN owners purchase more VNs on average (5+ EVN owners own 23.7 EVNs on average, whereas 5+ JVN owners own 17.1 JVNs each). This may be because there are 66% more commercial EVNs on Steam than commercial JVNs so there’s more to buy, and they cost far less (the average EVN is £7.31 vs £14.00 for JVNs). So let’s try comparing the average spent on VNs next. image These prices assume users paid full price so are overestimating the total spent, but the relative value between JVNs and EVNs should be fairly accurate. Here we can see the influence of those higher JVN prices. While EVN fans may buy more, they spend less. On average, EVN owners spend £60.87 while JVN owners spend £81.12. The richest 10% of spenders have a disproportionate influence on the industry, accounting for 60% of all EVN revenue and 53% of JVN revenue. This is broadly in line with the Steam average, where the top 10% of spenders account for 61% of all revenue. So far we’ve been treating JVN owners and EVN owners as distinct entities, as if they were two warring tribes. But are they actually the same users? Let’s investigate the overlap~ Given that 86% of free VNs currently on Steam are by English developers, I expected the free VN fanbase to overlap more with EVNs, but it’s actually JVN owners who play free VNs more frequently, as 62.1% of JVN owners play free VNs but only 52.9% of EVN owners do too. Perhaps it’s because there are more EVN owners who are only lightly into VNs so are less aware of other free VN releases. Equally surprising is how many JVN owners also own EVNs: 75.2%. Despite the reputation of JVNs being the elitist community, it’s EVNs owners who are less likely to try JVNs where only 52.4% of them own a JVN. "But what about bundles” I hear the comment sections cry. Perhaps some EVN/JVN owners just picked up one in a bundle and aren’t really fans of them? OK, let’s retry this overlap with only those users who have at least 5 EVNs/JVNs/Free VNs in their library. The biggest drop in size is the free VN category, who lose 88.5% of their users. Meanwhile, the overlap between EVN and JVN fans has only grown tighter; with 60.1% of those who own 5+ EVNs also owning at least 5 JVNs. So it doesn’t seem like bundles explain the strong overlap between JVN and EVN fans, but let’s try another test. If someone picked up a VN through a bundle that they aren’t interested in, they probably wouldn’t play it. So let’s try only counting VNs that have been played: There’s been a slight drop in how many JVN players also play EVNs, at 67.6%, but it’s still a significant overlap. So while bundles likely do inflate EVN numbers slightly, there’s no denying how linked the fandoms are. Overall, 59.3% of owned JVNs were played, while 56.2% of EVNs were. The lower EVN percentage is perhaps due to user’s owning more EVNs on average. Although both played stats were higher than the Steam average, where only 49.2% of owned games have any recorded playtime. So what explains the lingering lower JVN ownership among EVN fans? Are EVNs perhaps catering to a wider audience? One thing the EVN scene is known for it its profusion of otomes (VNs with a female protagonist pursuing male love interests), so let’s compare their overlap. Rather than being more insular, otome fans are even more willing to try VNs developed in another language, with 81.2% of EVN otome owners also owning a JVN, and 90.3% of JVN otome owners also owning EVNs. However the overlap between otomes fandoms is smaller than EVNs/JVNs overall (68.6% of JVN otome owners also own EVN otomes, and 37.9% of EVN otomes owners own a JVN otome). Something that especially stands out is just how many otome fans there are in the VN market. 33.1% of EVN owners and 42.1% of JVN owners own an otome. They make up a significant part of the fandom, but many online VN community hubs either ignore or are outright hostile to them. So it otome’s don’t explain the EVN/JVN gap, what does? To further investigate we’re going to need to delve into individual VN statistics and look through a lot of lists, so I’ll keep that for my next post in a week or two. Potential issues We’ve been basing these statistics on public user profiles, however only 7.4% of Steam users have their game list public. So it’s possible we’re undercounting the more casual userbase who are less likely to have configured their profile to be public. This has been an analysis of only Steam users, and while Steam is a major part of the game industry, it’s not the only source of VNs. JVN fans may prefer to stick with Mangagamer/Denpasoft etc, while EVN fans may prefer itch.io. So it’s possible the JVN/EVN fandom splits more than these figures would imply. Conclusion In my experience, the popular image of the VN fandom is of a male JVN elitist who hates EVNs and would never read an otome, but that really isn’t representative of the customer base. The majority of JVN fans also enjoy EVNs, the average JVN owner owns more EVNs (10.9) than JVNs (7.6). The same is true of EVN fans, who while preferring EVNS (8.5 owned on average) still frequently own JVNs (5.0 owned on average). So the canny VN developer would do well to advertise in both EVN and JVN fandom communities. --- I hope you enjoyed the analysis. Please let me know what you think and share any alternative theories you have on these stats. If you’re interested in more, check out my other posts on tumblr, watch for updates on my twitter, or give me a yell on Discord (Sunleaf_Willow ／(^ n ^=)＼#1616). Special thanks to /u/8cccc9, Part-time Storier, and Lunaterra for help with the analysis. I just do these analyses for fun, but if you want to support my work with a tip, I accept small donations at ko-fi.

Reminder that Kepposhi is a sexual harasser

I definitely prefer JVN over JPVN as it saves a letter and also I've been using it for ages so get on my communal lawn and all that fvck I'm sleepy kokoro hold me