Nandemonai

Very true. This guy was an admin for the city, got pissy when he was let go, and seized control of the network he was administrating. He made the mayor come personally see him (in jail) before he would reveal the password. This happened more than 20 years ago. And here's an article telling people "hey, you guys know this is illegal". The standard practice now is that if an employee is getting fired or laid off, you have to make it a surprise in order to protect yourself. Many times the employees will be escorted from the building by security immediately after they've been notified. This isn't the nicest way to go about it, but it isn't anything unusual either. I do, however, disagree that the layoffs won't have significant long term effect. There's a good chance the layoffs either are a sign that long term prospects are already rocky, or will make the situation worse in the long run.

Well, there goes the neighborhood. I wouldn't be surprised if they respond to this by launching more Kickstarters, it brings in a chunk of money up front in exchange for a lot more hassle down the road. And obviously they're hurting for money. Companies that aren't hurting for money don't do this. And wiping out the ENTIRE marketing team is a very questionable long term move. Look on the bright side: If worst does come to worst, Jast USA has a long history of license rescuing titles from bankrupt localization companies. There's a decent chance they could clear Sekai's backlog by 2030. Perhaps the early 2030's.

I'm not even sure the VIC-20 could hold a single one of the sprites in its 10K of RAM. Never mind the single-button joystick. Or the fact that Trails in the Sky's text would fill up dozens of floppies even if compressed**. I can see it now... I walk up to a townsperson, press FIRE to open the menu, then select TALK, but this NPC isn't on the same disk as the NPC I just talked to. The game prompts me to INSERT DISK #28. ** - The successor system, the Commodore 64, had floppies with 190K of space per side. But you can't fill it entirely with text. Because the machine has such low RAM, you'd have to store the game program and some of the graphics on each disk. You'd end up with a lot less than 190K of usable space for dialog when you were done.

JAST licensed Littlewitch Romaneque after Littlewitch had already gone under.

That was supposed to be attached to Infernoplex's post mentioning Ojou-sama to Himitsu no Otome - which is a Moonstone Honey game. I'm not sure how that got screwed up.

It is Moonstone. Moonstone games seem to print money for MangaGamer.

I will second the Trails series. Trails in the Sky was originally released in 2004 and it will probably run on your toaster. The game is completely awesome, though, especially with the addition of Turbo mode (the battles can be a bit slow-moving).

Huh. They updated the storefront page. All the 瓦石語 (garbagese) seems to be gone now, except for the one screenshot (which hasn't been changed). Perhaps it actually isn't being machine translated. (I'll still be wanting to see an explanation for what the hell that was they posted.)

It doesn't even require Lose to have lied, explicitly. A simple miscommunication would suffice. It's entirely possible Lose always intended from day one to release the altered version, and Sekai Project from day one thought getting a 100% unaltered release was in the cards. And further that Sekai thought it was so obvious that you wouldn't alter the 18+ version that they didn't think to ask, and certainly never wrote down in the contract. Everyone involved thinks everybody else is on the same page... but they aren't.

This is not a big change. For as long as VNs have been getting localized, sales have been this poor. It is only in the last few years that are the exception. Since the opening of Steam, and their success on Kickstarter, some of them have started finding more mainstream success. In 2011, for example, MangaGamer projected that Koihime Musou wouldn't crack 2000 sales, so they couldn't afford to pay the VA licensing fee, so they had to strip it out. Many years ago someone did a VN panel at ACen. (This would have been more than 10 years ago; it was a one-off thing from the days when there was Jast, and that was it.) The guy pulls up a copy of Tokimeki Checkin! and says "there isn't any voice in this game", to which I said 'That's funny. There most definitely is voice in the game'. The guy says "there, uh, isn't in the copy that I have". (Meaning it was pirated; in those days h-game pirates cut out voice to make the game smaller.) When I got on his case about it he was like 'yeah okay maybe I'll start buying them' and I said 'what about this one right here? There are copies right across the street [in the dealer's room].' And the guy tells me to my face "I already have it." I guarantee way more than 2-3 thousand people have played Subahibi.

Yeah, I'm not a fan of that kind of content, but after the XChange 3 incident years ago, Jast promised to announce ahead of time whenever any such changes were going to be made. Their track record honoring that promise has not been super great.

It certainly is not. Kickstarters are a pain in the ass to set up, requiring months of work to line up. We know this because of how long elapses between when companies announce they're going to do a Kickstarter and/or when the Prefundia goes up, and when the Kick actually Starts. Just because you don't see them doing that work in public doesn't mean they're not busy bees. Don't be Mr. PHB. What are they doing? They're figuring out what their budget is going to be. That tells them how much money they need to ask for. Who's going to translate the game and for how much money? What's it going to cost us to get rights to the voices? How much trouble do we expect from the engine? Are we likely to need 1 dev for 3 months tops for a few minor changes, or a major overhaul involving a whole team for the better part of a year? And they're trying to nail down stretch goals. What can we offer as a stretch goal? If it's merchandise, you have to estimate how much it's going to cost for shipping or you end up losing money on every pledge. Do you have piles of unsold merch laying around that you want to try to get rid of? If you're going to offer new merch, do you make it before the KS and risk ending up with piles of unsold merch that you need to get rid of? Or do you only produce what's actually demanded from the KS (plus some extra for lost or damaged merchandise)? How long a lead time will that take, who are you going to order it from, how much is it going to cost, and what's the minimum print run? If it's extra content or added features for the game, there are similar problems scoping and sizing all of that. Is this bonus content something that's easy enough for us to do? How much do we think it will cost us to do the extra work versus how much extra money do we think we can ask for? Can we even get the voice actors back into a studio? Is the writer interested in writing that extra scenario, and are they available? In other words, to do a Kickstarter right involves a whole lot of pre-planning work up front to scope out exactly what you think you can do, and what it's going to cost you to do it. That work is not free; it's money spent and time not available for other things. All in the hope that your project might get funded. Try to skimp on this, and you can easily end up with a successfully-funded project badly in the red because you're on the hook for a bunch of obligations the Kickstarter did not bring in enough money to cover. And that's not even including the giant pain in the ass that are Kickstarter projects that get delayed. How long did it take Sekai Project to deliver on all their Grisaia promises? I believe the physical rewards shipped in April. 2 and a half years after the projected date. The Kickstarter has 75 updates. As someone who's had to prepare similar updates before, I guarantee many of those updates took hours to prepare, in terms of meetings and follow up to gather the info contained in them.

Yep. It took more than ten years of shooting the breeze about the differences between Japanese and English before I realized that English actually does have honorifics. Military ranks are a good one, too. In Japanese, they say the equivalent of Sergeant Bob. They don't say Sergeant Bob-san. The sergeant part is the honorific. Well, we pretty much do exactly the same thing, except we invert the word order so the honorific comes first. When people were first trying to computerize speech recognition and the like, they went to the experts in the world of linguistics and tried to use the commonly-accepted facts as the truth. Come to find out linguistics was full of inaccuracies and oversimplifications. People don't pause between words, for instance. What we actually do is draw out the last sound for awhile, then launch into the next word. Try it; pausing. between. words. makes. you. sound. like. a. robot. There are lot more phonemes than people thought, too. Most vowels make more than two sounds, for instance.

Incredibly nitty nitpick: honorifics are not completely alien in English. We actually have an almost identical concept. It's just that it's such a small part of the language that it's almost died out, because the situations that spawned it relate to social structures that basically haven't existed for hundreds of years; whereas in Japan it's still highly relevant to daily life. When you're in court, what do you call the judge? Your honor. The judge is introduced as The honorable so-and-so. And it is always only for other people. Consider this classic Three Stooges bit. Why is it funny? Because everyone knows that you call a judge your honor to show proper respect, and you certainly never call them "Mister Court". And because the very idea of anyone using this form of address as My honor is inherently ridiculous. No judge ever refers to him or her self as my honor. It simply is not done. They always refer to themselves in an impersonal way as the court. Likewise, when was the last time any Pope ever referred to himself as My Holiness? Does the Queen of England refer to herself as My Majesty? Certainly not. That's what the royal we is for; it is a humbling form of address, implying it isn't even really a person talking but a mouthpiece on behalf of the nation itself. Now, honorifics in Japanese indicate precise levels of respect and/or familiarity between the speaker and whoever they're referring to. Not adding one when you need to, or using an overly informal one, is insulting. When you get right down to it, forms of address like Your Grace are almost exactly the same in English in this respect as honorifics in Japanese, and they're even often combined with the individual's name in a very similar way. Someone who is entitled to be called Your Grace will be very put out if you don't do it. And while today, very few people could tell you the precise difference between Your Grace and Your Excellency, that did not used to be the case. They're not exactly the same: It is more common in English to use the honorific alone, because usually when you need one, it's unambiguous who it refers to. But if there happens to be more than one judge in the room, you fall back to Judge So-and-so which is even more like an honorific. So yes, English actually has honorifics. They're like the appendix of English; basically useless, but still technically there. So unimportant that most people wouldn't even recognize that that's what it is. (Hell, for years I would have said we didn't have honorifics.)