Darklord Rooke

I know that nowadays you rarely come here and probably have enough of this, but still another congratulatory message shouldn't be hurt even though it's a belated one. Happy belated 36th birthday to you and I hope that you'll have a good year ahead as usual, @Darklord Rooke. 

I know you're probably tired of hearing this by now, but happy birthday, Rooke!

Wait, are you all telling me @Darklord Rooke is even older now?
Wow.
Happy birthday, Rooke.

The "this should be a blog post" feedback is an allusion to the blog feature of Fuwanovel.  It's a nice way to collect together your high-content posts in one place.  If you feel the topic is of general interest and want to encourage ongoing discussion, you can then create a discussion thread and link to the blog post.  It helps to have a summary line to grab readers' interest so they'll read the full article.

Glad to see we're finally getting a complete edition of Vesperia officially in english.

New Elder Scrolls
about bloody time
 

Shadows Die Twice looks fantastic! Recently there's been so many good games coming out, good times to be a gamer :3

Shadows Die Twice looks fantastic! Recently there's been so many good games coming out, good times to be a gamer :3

Agreed, that I DID watch through (and have even reviewed it somewhere here on fuwa) and did NOT regret, and although it was slow, very slow, it had probably the reference ending for how to make an ultimately happy conclusion.

While Ranma is a classic, Rumiko Takahashi's best work was always Maison Ikkoku (heartwarming romance ahoy)  

I finished watching Ranma ½. Not even sure why I did in the end, but it started out because it is a classic comedy still revered today, and when I first started watching it I found myself actually laughing at it. Well it tired quickly and for whatever reason I kept watching till I watched all 161 episodes. If anyone else has this much spare time on their hands and is considering it, all I can say is: don't do it. It was a good way to put me to sleep at the end of the night when I was still buzzing and needed something that would make me want to go to bed. The slapstick gets tired very quickly, the same plots get rehashed a dozen times over, and there is virtually no forward progress in the story. About its only redeeming feature was showing nipples before they were considered too raunchy for even ecchi shows on TV, though there's nothing titillating (heh) about how they're presented here

and we got the shadows die twice trailer dropped.
 
 
sadly nioh came out first so now a lot of people are gonna compare this to that even though its only just because nioh was released first. pretty sure this has been in development for a long time.
 
microsoft announced it so theres worry that its gonna be an exclusive which i highly doubt it will be. from software is japanese based and since sony is so prominent in japan, they dont want to be shunned by them. plus, who really wants to be an xbox one exclusive?

I was sure I'd done an analysis post on this, but it turns out I never posted it publicly. This graph was an early draft and the data is a bit out of date, but it's still accurate. I analysed the kind of content people were reading in the VNs they rated each month, to see how the popularity of sexual content was changing over time.

While some degree of sexual content has generally always been the norm (it still accounts for over 60% of read VNs), it's generally been dropping these past couple of years, likely due to the increasing popularity of EVNs where sexual content has historically been quite rare. There might also have been a Steam effect back then, as at the time, Steam didn't allow nudity in VNs, so all-age VNs were getting a popularity boost. That's been changing recently though, Steam allows nudity, and EVNs are beginning to embrace their more hedonistic side. I'll have to do another updated chart on this sometime.

I posted an analysis at some point where I think I counted 18+ vs. <18 releases for original Japanese titles on VNDB, probably Windows-only.  It came out to around ~80% 18+ I think.

No.
I realize some people might be a little confused about what this thread is meant to do. To quote Down for those who haven't actually read the thread's first post:
In addition, here is a snippet from the Forum Rules:
In general, try to keep the above posts in mind for next time when deciding whether you should bump this thread or contact a moderator about the situation. (Most of the time you will be better off going for the latter.)
 
On topic, I personally like to let users know when I hide their content, however the specific case in question had a certain user trolling, and other people quoting/ replying to him then also had their content hidden. In these cases, it can be hard to let everyone know that they had their content hidden, especially when many people join in. Like Palas said though, in those situations a simple "stop it" message from a mod goes a long way. That is something we can look into doing more often, so people don't make the situation worse by posting again, thinking it was some kind of mistake/ bug.

I feel that this stance would have more merit if we didn't already have half a decade of exactly that. And we've seen the outcome: Massive oversaturation that hurts indie games, an entire culture of asset flips, a failed attempt at implementing user curation (Greenlight) that was perhaps due to the environment fostered by Valve's hands-off approach in the first place, outright bigoted games (anyone remember Slave Tetris?).
Especially seeing as there are already huge swathes of the gaming community who are the sort of people who raise hell over a woman on a game cover or who stir shit the moment a gay character appears in a game, I'd say we've seen enough to know that neither the developers nor the consumers have the sense to fully regulate themselves in this regard (Bloodbath Kavkaz was greenlit), both in terms of the quality of the games on the store, and in terms of not promoting bigotry.
There isn't much that the free market can do to decide right now. Many people don't know GOG or itch.io even exist, and even if they did, in terms of game availability, local pricing, networking (GOG's only recently rolled out a profile system) and other factors, nothing faces up to Steam. The only way to see if the market decides one way or the other is to make Steam implement curation and see how that affects the industry. Not that I believe following the money trail is necessarily the most wise, helpful or ethical choice in this regard.

As a philosophical stance, I find Valve's policy brief interesting.  They're basically taking a hands-off libertarian approach, presuming that the market will sort itself out if the proper filtering tools are provided.  Applied to the market as a whole, I find this viewpoint irresponsible--regulation and quality standards are necessary to prevent predatory practices and exploitation--but for a video game store it could be appropriate.  We have curated alternatives, so there's no reason to cry 'the sky is falling' over an ideological experiment.  Let the market decide whether it wants an uncurated store.

I have necroed this thread to announce that this question, along with many other issues surrounding waifus, have finally been thoroughly researched and analysed. For everybody's convenience, the findings have been condensed down by a Youtube celeb to a 10 minute academic video. Rejoice everyone.
 

I have necroed this thread to announce that this question, along with many other issues surrounding waifus, have finally been thoroughly researched and analysed. For everybody's convenience, the findings have been condensed down by a Youtube celeb to a 10 minute academic video. Rejoice everyone.
 

It's always been their unofficial policy, but it was inconsistently applied. This lead to various people, including some connected with MG, to bemoan publicly the inconsistent application of the rules. Well HOORAY FOR EVERYONE looks like they're getting consistent, I hope everybody is happy  

Speaking from personal experience, GOG is not friendly toward Japanese indie games, especially visual novels. There may be some exceptions but it's clear to me they don't really want those non-games in their store. They're at least as bad in this regard than Steam was pre-Greenlight, quite possibly worse with their internal bias.
As for the main topic, well I can't say too much and it's mostly speculation, but it's worth bearing in mind that most adult content of sexual nature is already forbidden in their terms of service. This has been enforced very laxly so far, but with the removal of any Steam-side curation with Steam Direct, and people pushing boundaries with new titles, it wouldn't surprise me if they've gotten fed up and decided to write actual internal guidelines (good luck getting them to share those), which may have turned out stricter than previous case by case judgments. There may be actual legal reasons (at least plausible threat of legal action for violating some regional laws for selling pornographic content either containing minors, or to minors) for this, though it'll never be more than speculation since they'd never disclose such detail. If anything, I've been surprised at what -has- been allowed in the marketplace over the past few years until now.
I can't say I know the details of affected games' contents, but it seems to me we're pretty much talking about games that already self-censored themselves and released adult content as an off-Steam patch, and which haven't been just removed from Steam but given an opportunity to correct the content further, which should in this case just mean moving a bit more of the content into the patch, and shouldn't be an unreasonable amount of work.

It's always been their unofficial policy, but it was inconsistently applied. This lead to various people, including some connected with MG, to bemoan publicly the inconsistent application of the rules. Well HOORAY FOR EVERYONE looks like they're getting consistent, I hope everybody is happy  

It's always been their unofficial policy, but it was inconsistently applied. This lead to various people, including some connected with MG, to bemoan publicly the inconsistent application of the rules. Well HOORAY FOR EVERYONE looks like they're getting consistent, I hope everybody is happy  

It's always been their unofficial policy, but it was inconsistently applied. This lead to various people, including some connected with MG, to bemoan publicly the inconsistent application of the rules. Well HOORAY FOR EVERYONE looks like they're getting consistent, I hope everybody is happy  

Quality discussion requires a topic worth discussing.  Allow me to assist: the developers of Huniepop and other VN devs on Steam have just been served a notice from Valve that their games will be removed in 2 weeks.  Is this the beginning of the end for VNs in the West, or the end of the beginning?  Ready, set, go!