Nandemonai

Don't presume to speak for "the target audience". That's hubris enforced by the echo chamber you live in. Most people do not engage online communities. Only the biggest diehard fans do. A small subset, skewed heavily towards those with strong opinions, is not a representative sample. And your opinion is not even universally shared among the online community.

Shady fundraiser? What would be shady about it?

Nah, they're ... okay, they're not "fine". But this has happened at least once before, when their Steam key policy backfired and caused a raft of fraud that forced them to get cut off by their then-current payment processor. MangaGamer still has games on Steam making them money, and they are run by a group of Japanese VN companies anyway. Sure, the games on Steam probably aren't making them that much money, but that's always been true and they've been around for 10 years now.

Seems like you double-linked the same blog post, @Clephas.

Well, Jast USA is going to take a very dim view of you ruining their investment like that. (Because that's exactly what they'll think of it.) The title is licensed, so it's off limits. "10 users" on this forum can't give you Jast USA's blessing to continue (because they're not Jast USA). Jast USA cannot simply ignore someone continuing to fan TL a game they're working on, after they've publicly announced they're doing it. If you don't stop, first, you're being very inconsiderate to them. And second, you put them in a situation where they have no choice but to formally DMCA the project. And given the number of people associated with localization companies (like the official Frontwing account) that post here, you should assume they're going to find out about it. If you're trying to learn Japanese, then it doesn't need to be this game, specifically, does it? The game someone else paid the original creator to get dibs on? Just do yourself a favor and find a different game. There is no shortage of good games that aren't licensed.

Sorry, but you can't no-true-Scotsman your way around the fact that in the very early days there were no fan patches at all. Back in 1996 Jast USA released Season of the Sakura. In 1999 Otaku Publishing released True Love. The first really successful fan patch (that I know of) was Tsukihime, and that didn't release until like 2004. By the time fan patches were a thing, G-Collections had come and gone already. They released a game a month for about 2 years before they imploded. Between that, C's Ware, Jast USA / Peach Princess's output, and the half a dozen other companies (or so) that released one or two games then folded (including Megatech, the first company to translate an h-game - in 1992!) ... Fan patches have always been outnumbered by official releases. Sure, most of the games released in those early days weren't all that great (and the translations weren't either). But they were there. In 2010, there were loads of legitimate releases to choose from (including Demonbane). You can't ignore the giant pile of releases, then say "see, there isn't anything here"

That can't be right. It's got to be more than 5 illegal downloads for each purchase. He must have been being overly conservative. Edit to add: The claim of selling about a thousand units or so seems pretty on the money to me. I'll put it this way: Nekopara was successful enough to propel Sekai into a major publisher and keep them there. If all games sold like Nekopara, we'd see a lot more English releases by more publishers. Another fun fact: If you take the average Kickstarter take, and divide by $40, except for the extreme outliers, you get a number that's the equivalent of between 1K and 2K copies sold.

Except that the main character is a girl, and there seem to be "heroines". I considered looking at the CG, but I have an allergic reaction to [edit: NC material]. VNDB did list lots of straight (rape) action in the tags though. So I dunno. The only one that seems remotely in line with that hint is this game. Even if it doesn't fit very well. Either that or they're going to announce it at that November con (or maybe next year; perhaps, say, a complication came up in the licensing).

So they did. And now that I look at the status tracker again, the yuri title is probably https://vndb.org/r64810. I haven't even really thought about that one since it doesn't appeal to me at all.

They sort of have now, actually: mangagamer.org/announcements now says this: Update: Thank you to everyone who attended our Otakon panel! We'll be at Anime NYC next, so stay tuned for more information. Curiously enough, unlike at AX, they didn't indicate which secret projects the 3 were. So even though there were 3 Otakon announcements and 3 secret projects, we don't know all the announcements were secret projects. Maybe none of them were and Anime NYC will be full of announcements! (Probably not. Their announcements page has 12 already and they release 1 game a month.)

Well, that's very interesting, actually; I don't think any of the Otakon announcements really satisfies the yuri hint, do they?

It's a complex series of tradeoffs. MangaGamer definitely cannot release stuff on other companies' stores while theirs isn't working, then yank them once things are back up and running. Not unless they want to burn all the bridges. So if they put their games on another storefront, that's a long term relationship. Which, yes, brings extra business but also its own set of drawbacks. MangaGamer also does not want to help another company become the de facto Sexy Steam (the place everyone goes to buy games and you're screwed if your game isn't there). Why are Steam's spastic fits and inability to act as a gatekeeper to their own store such a big deal? Because Steam has a hold on a vast audience that will only deal with you Steam's way, or the highway. Steam has power, when they throw their weight around, the earth moves. So in addition to having to pay someone else the platform tax, and giving that platform a gift of raising that platform's visibility by their games' presence on it - MangaGamer runs the risk of helping to create a situation where yet another company has effective control over the distribution destiny of their games. That position (being The Hentai Store)? That's exactly what Nutaku and Fakku want. It's no surprise the established VN companies are reluctant to go whole hog on lending their libraries to them. They don't want to be beholden to someone else the way they're beholden to Steam. If anything, they themselves want to be in that position.

This is par for the course. The last time they had to get a new payment processor it took something like 2 months. First they have to talk to a bunch of different payment processor companies to try and find one they want to work with. Then they have to have their web developers (who are all contractors, that's why they don't do things to their site all that often, it's a royal pain for them to do it) integrate with this new system. Each of these can easily take a few weeks. Minimum.

Exactly. "They used to have them" is perfectly consistent with what we've been told (which is that they didn't have stuff backed up as well as they thought they did). Given the way things like this work, it's always possible someone finds an old computer tucked away in a closet somewhere that has the files. Much old TV that was once thought lost forever has been rediscovered that way. But odds aren't good.

You did, when you said 'etc etc'. MangaGamer is one of those other companies. Your point also can't reasonably be addressed without pointing out the fact that issues like this are common. The point that I'm making is that you can't just gloss over MangaGamer. It's directly on point. I'm explicitly comparing Sol Press' gymnastics (with the clean-site-and-patch-elsewhere smoke and mirrors) to MangaGamer because while the symptoms/coping mechanisms might be different, the root cause of the issue is the same in both cases. There are no good solutions here. I mean, I guess Sol Press could sue a bank for viewpoint discrimination against them. But they don't have deep enough pockets to tank the legal opposition, never mind the fallout. Licensors decide 'maybe let's not sign with the people making huge waves'. A firestorm of controversy erupts after the smell of good legal drama draws a media circus, and they figure out what exactly Sol Press is selling. Sol Press also isn't big enough to attract the 'don't mess with the money cart' attitude. They see MangaGamer as a good example of what not to do (MG can't unbundle the sites at this point - they can't even get a simple forum back up - so they have to muddle through with the payment processors they can get). What does that leave? Something like what they're doing.