Warfoki

Well, that's not hard, since he's basically the Hungarian version of Trump. Uhm, yeah, I derped out on that one. Sorry 'bout that.

Don't even get me started on that bloody moron. Just hearing his name makes my blood pressure reach unhealthy levels. But, yeah, that idea crashed and burned. He learned the hard way that if you fuck with the internet, the internet tends to fuck right back. Also, this preemptive taxation thing wasn't his idea, it was a thing long before that. Degica and Sekai Project are basically the same thing. SP handles the family friendly side of the business, while Degica deals with the not Steam-friendly versions.

No, not that I'm aware of. He simply said that the site started to cost more than he could safely finance, so he had to either put advertisements up or use referrals. Since he hates the idea of obnoxious ads on the site with a passion, he went for the referrals. He said that now that the income of those is enough to keep the servers up. He never said how much servers cost and how much he personally pays to keep the site running or even if he still pays anything. For the entire piracy discussion: Hungary is also a haven for piracy, we are probably the most pirate-heavy country within the EU. Cheap and fast internet (that kinda happens when you have a lot of ISP competing), low salary and a legal system that gives no two fucks about piracy. In our country, if you buy any data storage device, you'll have to pay a lot more for them than anywhere else, because Artisjus (Hungarian version of RIAA) takes a cut for all of them with the justification, that you'll use them to pirate shit anyway. So they preemptively take the money from that instead of going through the slow and outdated court system for money.

I remember reading a discussion on that from MG. Now, don't quote me on this, since it was a while ago, but as far as I can remember MG is keenly aware of Erogegames existence. However, EG is operating form Ukraine, so outside of EU and USA jurisdictions. SO to get them, MG, would have to enter a legal battle in Ukraine, where the digital copyright laws are more... relaxed. So it would be a costly court case on foreign soil with no guarantee for a positive outcome for them. MG siimply doesn't have the money to throw around for that. Also, it could create a bad precedent, should they lose. And they can't do much about the download service either, since as far as I remember downloadani.me is run by the same guy who runs EG and is also operated from outside of the EU and USA jurisdictions. So they let EG get away with their referral, because that way at least some people might use them to buy the games after / instead of downloading it, somewhat mitigating their losses. Again, it's been a while since I looked up all this, so I might remember some details poorly, so don't quote me on this.

As far as I know, those links work as referrals, so just having them there doesn't mean any money. People have to buy something through those links for VNDB to have a cut. Ironically enough Erogegames is also using such referral links for the MG titles.

Meh, nevermind, I took like half a minute to make an account. Yeah, paying YouTube and Twitch celebs for coverage can be very costly. An example, just to put in context. A Japanese dev team made a competitive card game, Shadowverse. Now, the biggest name in this genre is obviously Blizzard's own Hearthstone, so to help advertise their stuff, the Shadowverse devs paid the top Hearthstone streamers to promote their game. one of the most popular HS streamers, Kripparrian, said on stream (if I remember correctly) that he gets around $2 000 per hour for streaming Shadowverse instead of Hearthstone. Obviously VNs are nowhere near as popular as HS, so coverage would be somewhat cheaper, but yeah, if you want to buy the time of really poplar youtubers and twitch streamers, then that's not going to be cheap.

I ended up making an account to be able to answer here after all. I'm the guy who answered the questions earlier, I'm part of the moderator team on VNDB. Sekai Project has monetary issues, because according to their own comments on VNDB, they spend a good chunk of their income to financially help Japanese VN companies stay in business with donations and such.