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KuroganeHomura

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Everything posted by KuroganeHomura

  1. The audience/demand for eroge might grow; the problem is if the supply dwindles because companies won't license the adult versions anymore. Pulltop used to work with JAST to release adult games. When they formed MoeNovel, they stopped doing so, likely because they wanted to promote their games as "clean". The non-adult market is a threat to the adult market not simply because it's an alternative, but because in some cases appealing to one market means abandoning the other. Sekai Project headed in that direction too, but the backlash from the fanbase appears to have made them reconsider--for now. Correct. The reason I'm not worried despite that is that the appeal of catering to the all-ages market only lasts as long as that market isn't saturated. If enough companies were to go down that road, they'd see diminishing returns pretty quickly. The reason everyone and their dog is rushing to Steam is that it is (was) a potential market that had so far been essentially untapped. The more companies release their VNs on Steam, the less potential for success there is for additional companies doing the same. Which is why I think even the worst-case scenario of almost everyone abandoning the 18+ market in favor of releasing all-ages versions only wouldn't last long. In that scenario, the all-ages market would quickly become oversaturated and the incentives would reverse. Suddenly the 18+ market would be the on with untapped potential. A fair deal less potential seeing as the 18+ market in the West is still a lot smaller than the all-ages one, but I don't think that would matter much at that point. Some potential is better than none at all. I don't think we'll ever see that worst-case scenario playing out, though. I doubt MG would ever abandon their 18+ fanbase, for instance. Doesn't make sense to risk what's kept them alive so far. Some other companies like SP might go down that road, as might some Japanese devs. But I don't see eroge releases ever dying off. Fluctuations in the ratio of 18+ to all-ages releases, certainly, but I don't think it'll go beyond that.
  2. More prostitute heroines please. As far as the ratio of virgin to non-virgin heroines goes, google kannagi virgin.
  3. sanahtlig: The market for VNs on Steam isn't unlimited. It may be growing, but I don't think it's growing fast enough to accommodate a large amount of Japanese devs flooding it with releases. If that were to happen, at some point it would be more profitable to release something with 18+ content, either to set yourself apart from the rest, or to target the group of fans that prefers eroge. Which is to say, even in a hypothetical scenario where eroge releases mostly or totally dried up momentarily, I don't think that would last very long. Plus, as the market on Steam grows, the market for eroge grows as well, since part of the audience on Steam will be interested in eroge. It may only be a fraction and hence a considerably slower growth, but that's still an upwards trend then, not a downwards one. Rooke: The idea is that if you've already got an 18+ label on your product, you'll be much less inclined to think "hm, could this get us a higher rating than we want? should we cut this? should we hold back a little here?".
  4. Moege generally aren't something I personally go for, but I can definitely see a lot of untapped potential there. Case in point, Princess Evangile seems to have done really well for MG. The western market is probably big enough by now to sustain a few releases of that kind each year. Pretty sure someone's going to fill that gap sooner or later. There's money to be made there, after all. As far as running out of good games goes, I don't really think that's all that much of an issue, except for kickstarters. It's somewhat hard to succesfully kickstart a localization of an unknown game, even if the game is really good, moreso if the game is good but not really amazing. I do think the market is big enough to sustain a few releases per genre for a number of genres each year, though. And although the Japanese market favors moeges, it's not like that's the only kind of game released there, or the only successful kind, even. Case in point: https://twitter.com/shigeo_h/status/662615531426476033 https://twitter.com/shigeo_h/status/663283963264274432, and that game is anything but a moege. Put another way, the output per year of Japanese releases is still far greater than the output of localizations, so even given a slant towards certain genres in the original market, there's still a big enough pool to pick from so that you don't need to localize crap just to avoid running out of games to release. For that matter, while the pool of really awesome VNs may be rather small, a game doesn't have to be absolutely amazing to sell well enough to turn a profit. It just has to be good. There's many more good VNs than amazing ones. And indeed, a VN doesn't have to be good or even just decent to do well - case in point, any of the Sakura games. So all in all, I'm not worried. At the current size, we won't ever run out of games to localize. And if the market does grow further, it'll eventually be big enough to influence the decisions made by Japanese devs on what kind of game to produce - or allow devs that already produce games suited to the western market to give their games a higher budget since they can count on additional sales from this market.
  5. A quick count of nukige in MG's catalog: 2015: 8 2014: 11 2013: 8 2012: 4 2011: 3 2010: 2 2009: 1 2008: 3 If someone feels like counting the fan translations, that should give us most of the remaining data needed to complete the chart.
  6. Yeah, it finally happened. Maybe if the games do well enough on Steam, we'll actually see Cave returning to producing something other than mobile games, too. For the time being, playing Mushihime on something other than a crappy PS2 emulator or MAME is pretty nice. Hope we'll see a port of SDOJ sooner or later. Edit: Incidentally, if anyone who's curious about shmups is reading this, the novice mode of Mushihime seems like a pretty good introduction to the genre. Novice original in particular should be pretty easy to 1cc with a bit of practice even if you haven't played any other shmups before. Granted, if you go from novice to normal, the difficulty jump is anything but gentle. Arrange might be nice, too, although the auto-bomb feature is a bit of a double-edged sword if you get too used to it. Still, if you watch a bit of the gameplay and think it's interesting, this game is probably for you.
  7. It does kinda seem like they just started working on it and at some point remembered "right, we need some money to actually finish this, don't we?" Well, except for the first stretch goal, the rest don't really feel particularly relevant, so I guess it's not that big of a deal so long as they at least manage to get the project funded.
  8. Somehow the campaign's moving a bit slower than I expected. Almost feel compelled to actually drop some money on it myself despite this being utterly not my genre. Would've thought it'd move a lot faster considering the title's been around for a while and seems pretty well-known.
  9. I hadn't realized Iris isn't a main heroine. That's a bit of a shock and a disappointment to me. I always look for that one heroine in a given eroge that grabs me, and Iris was that heroine in Libra of the Vampire Princess. I mean, she's even in the title and she doesn't have a route? >.>; No Iris route? Oh god damn it. Maybe there will be a fandisk for that if the game sells well enough? Maybe? Hopefully?
  10. I'm not 100% sure whether I played Sengoku Rance or read Yume Miru Kusuri first, but either way, I somehow stumbled upon those many years back. Read a few more VNs using machine translations, and then mostly nothing until I picked up first Kamidori Alchemy Meister, then Soukoku no Arterial a couple of years ago. Since I liked both, naturally I looked for more, and seeing as I was actually able to read Japanese by then, well, here I am.
  11. Considering how well the first game sold, the polls he did and the people most likely attracted to that game based on the art style, that just seems like a bad business decision. If you've got an established fanbase, there's not really any reason to do something that risks losing interest from a substantial fraction of that fanbase, hoping that your new game will sell anyway or attract a new fanbase. Maybe he made so much money he doesn't have to worry about that, though.
  12. Zenophilious: Kickstarter may not originally have been intended to be used this way, but SP are hardly the first or the most high-profile ones to use it this way. If you'd preferred Kickstarter to stay limited to usage for its original intent, well, that ship has sailed. Doesn't mean you've got to throw any money at their campaigns, of course - I pretty much never do, either, though that's because I'm just not interested in them to begin with. But I don't think it matters at this point whether SP continues using Kickstarter this way. It's not like there's some sort of finite pool of Kickstarter money that would go to other projects if SP stopped using it. Moreover, Kickstarter is very well suited for the VN market since it allows the company to offer the main product combined with additional stuff at a much higher price than they could get from a sale on Steam. There's a decent amount of people in the community who, if given the opportunity, are willing to spend well over 100$ for a VN that by itself would cost at most maybe 40$, which makes VNs viable that otherwise might not be able to recoup the costs of localization. So it's not just a matter of pushing the risk onto the customers. Amusingly enough, that clashes a bit with the idea that the traditional eroge fanbase aren't their target audience. I'm pretty sure most people willing to spend a large amount of money on a single VN would be part of that audience. Well, maybe not 4chan in particular, no idea about them. Personally, the main problem I have with SP is that they don't outright say "yes, we'll publish an 18+ version of every VN we license that has one, as long as the developer will let us", which irks me, no matter the reason they don't. But in the end that just means they get no money from me unless and until they do publish the 18+ version. I guess I'd actually be pissed if they got their hands on something I really cared about and proceeded to release only an all-ages version, but that fortunately hasn't happened so far.
  13. That's called survival of the fittest With the current state of things, I'm not giving MG and Jast more than another decade at most. Unlikely. Both survived just fine before VNs on Steam were even a thing.
  14. http://steamcommunity.com/app/377670/discussions/0/490124466479176329/ Would have been a good idea to post that sooner. If they needed to confirm whether they were allowed to say that, it would have been a good idea to talk to the devs beforehand. Making an official statement before there was any outrage would have prevented a lot of the outrage, or at least directed it away from SP.
  15. 170k seems like a tall order indeed. I'm not entirely sure about the 85k for the translation, but if they hired a translator from outside the scene, and depending on the exact length of the game, I could see that. Translations are normally a pretty expensive thing. Still, if there's any way to reduce the initial amount, that would probably be a good idea. I'll be backing the game either way, of course, but I'd really like to see it succeed.
  16. Considering they ended up not banning drawn material last time they changed the law, which was pretty recently, I doubt they're going to do anything in the near future. That whole "some UN asshole says something" thing has happened many times in the past without any result. It's not like the UN has any sort of power to force Japan to do anything. Really, the only worry I have is that they might do something because of the Olympics coming to Japan. But that would probably target adult material in general, rather than anything specific.
  17. Definitely. You'll know in advance that a few characters definitely survive to the end if you've played KnS 1 first, but I don't think that matters all that much.
  18. There is practically no guro and it's not meant to be shocking in that regard. It is still a nukige, though. I very heavily disagree with people who say the ero content isn't the main point. It is front and center in the VN and heartily invites you at every opportunity to fap to it. It is a parade of h-scenes with a bit of story in between. The story takes itself seriously and is another major component to it, but... yeah, it's a heavily fetishistic nukige. And, to be honest, it doesn't even seem to be that good of a story. Well, I'm usually into this kind of stuff, but nevertheless, I was thinking "please stop" much more than "this is hot", for the most part. Which is to say, I mostly enjoyed it for the story and the characters, rather than as fap material. I think that speaks for the quality of the writing. I'm sure it's meant to be enjoyable if you take it as fap material, too, but that doesn't diminish its other qualities in the least.
  19. Seeing as there's a trial version available now, I figured it was time we had a proper thread for discussing euphoria. Trial version is available here http://www.mangagamer.com/detail.php?goods_type=1&product_code=141 Info on the game is available here http://mangagamer.org/euphoria/ vndb Release Date: November 27th, 2015
  20. One more from the EFF https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/final-leaked-tpp-text-all-we-feared. As far as I'm concerned, the biggest problem is that prosecuting doujins etc. will be possible without a complaint from the rights holder. The other related stuff is essentially circumventable via the usual means, i.e. throwing more encryption at the problem. Use Tor, use I2P, whatever. It sucks, but you can deal with it. That, however, is a problem you can't deal with so easily. The whole doujin industry relies on a sort of silent agreement - I won't fuck you, you won't fuck me. This threatens to destroy that agreement, because a third party can interfere.
  21. http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/24/barack-obama-fast-track-trade-deal-tpp-senate As it stands, it can only either pass or not pass. Though, of course, it could fail, get renegotiated, and then pass. Hopefully it'll just fail and then stay dead.
  22. My first-year Japanese language college course was probably the hardest course I've ever taken--and I'm working on a PhD. I can't recall another course that required 5hrs of dedicated study a week in addition to class time (1hr per 1hr of courses). After all that I was nowhere near where I needed to be to even read a simple sentence. Now I can finally read some simple phrases unassisted--10 years later. Hm. I've never taken a course and didn't spend all that much time studying and I can read many VNs without using a dictionary and most without using a dictionary much. Although I guess the way I read VNs before I got to this level probably counts as studying - I extracted the text and used JDICT's text glossing or Rikaichan to read all the words I didn't know. I started about 9 years ago, but didn't use Japanese all that much until about 5 years ago. I figured it would take a lot less time if one were to actually sit down and study a lot. I think the only part that may actually be hard is getting an idea for how Japanese grammar works. Once you've gotten past that, the rest is just increasing the amount of words and grammar you know and getting more practice. If you use something like Tae Kim's Japanese Grammar Guide and spend 10 hours a week for a few months on just that, you should be able to understand and memorize at least most of it. Take another two to three months to acquire a very basic amount of vocabulary and you can start reading VNs using a dictionary. Then it's just a matter of how much time you spend reading.
  23. Learning Japanese really isn't all that hard. It does take a bit of time, though.
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