Xeviax

I actually have some firsthand knowledge about this! It 100% depends on the company. Some actually try to structure their games towards a western audience (and are beginning to make changes to all future games to do this, including making them all-ages or story-based), while others still see the west as an after-thought.

Listing on other distributors before Steam would severely impact sales and overall placement on Steam. Unfortunately, I wouldn't be surprised if doing that actually turned a title into a loss. We're definitely working on distributing on other platforms, but we don't plan on releasing titles on other platforms first.

For Sakura Sakura, the upscaling, translation, and editing is done. It still needs to get through QA though. Yotsunoha is also being QA'ed right now as well. We definitely want to release the titles as soon as possible (like you said, they do us no good not being on a store), but we want to make sure they get proper QA. From my understanding, the 18+ release is essentially a continuation of the all-ages volume 1, but it will include 18+ content (you can think of it almost like volume 1 chapter 1, and volume 1 chapter 2). The all-ages version would still be needed to follow the story.

Just so you guys know, this is not the Libra team. Sol Press is doing all translations and development in-house!

It is the whole trial translated!

I'm sorry to hear that Fred. With the Kickstarter meeting its goal so quickly, we wanted to demonstrate that we're actively working on the product even before the Kickstarter was finished. The demo is not currently available due to needing another QA pass as well as an engine issue which we are currently fixing. You may be surprised who the actual staff working on the project are, and we'll be announcing that in the coming days along with the demo. I hope the final demo changes your mind because we'd hate to lose your support!

I see that you're in Japan! The Japan tier has some special items such as a signed shikishi, and it will also receive the digital copies of the light novels if the goals are met! I have to say, most of the staff is currently looking forward to the Newton fidget spinner haha.

We were definitely shocked when the 2nd item pledged was a $1500 package! Everything's been going by so fast, we're absolutely stunned haha.

We try to be as open as possible. If you ever have questions just let us know. There are obviously some things we're not allowed to talk about (and some things we want to reveal at a certain time), but in general, our goal is to be pretty open.

We have a dev blog which we just recently released (although we've done a poor job of promoting it). It has a lot of similar info, but less detailed. I'm not sure if i'm allowed to link to it directly, but it can be found on our facebook announcement. You're telling me you don't want your friends to know you just bought an eroge that just came out, and have been mysteriously offline recently? :^). We technically have plans. The main areas we're worried about (at least me personally) are security, legality, and distribution. If we can handle all of those, I have no doubt our team can create an absolutely outstanding site.

I try to make sure that I read every comment that I can on here, and I can guarantee that I understand the position that you and Sol Press are in. Hopefully, I can provide you guys with some information real quick, and be as open as possible! In terms of licensing, this is something we've even discussed with different partners of ours. We are still small, so it is difficult to actually acquire anything substantial. The titles we have though mean the world to us, and we wouldn't have picked them up if we didn't like them. It's a growing game, so hopefully, in a few years you'll see us up near the top. For Kickstarters, I have the exact same worries as most of you. Translation quality, becoming reliant on Kickstarter, and reliability are all issues that are currently plaguing the industry. I personally have read each and every complaint about the translation quality of Sakura Sakura. We hesitated to release a Kickstarter Update until just a few days ago because there were so many changes happening each and every day in Sol Press to fix this. It was literally a "Let's wait until tomorrow to announce this because this is happening tomorrow also" that would repeat every day. In the Kickstarter update, we addressed the issue of translation quality by doing the following: We brought on more experienced translators (TBAC and Ningen) to assist with the translation. We also brought on two very experienced proofreaders and beta testers, Kitty-tama and Haerts (whose names I think most of you will recognize). To address issues of becoming reliant on Kickstarter, we've already begun projects that are not reliant on Kickstarter. We don't plan on announcing any of them through until they're much closer to release, but I can guarantee you it is something we want to move away from in the future. In summary: We'll get bigger titles as we slowly grow our name, but in our personal beliefe, each one of our titles is special and worth a read. I personally read all the criticism I can find, even if it hurts. We're actively taking steps to improve on our weaknesses. We're going to be moving away from Kickstarter, although the first few Kickstarters are to Kickstart the company as a whole. They help to build a rhythm and structure our deadlines/timeframes. alice is super cute. I've always been available on Discord for any DM's. If you see an issue arising at our company, please let me know! It's a lot easier to fix issues before it becomes ingrained in company culture than after. I also want to point out that we are trying to identify issues we see are arising as well. An example would be honorifics. To help alleviate this issue, I came up with the idea of a honorifics toggle system. Our surveys have pointed out that there is a large demographic that was being ignored with this. 13% of readers prefer no honorifics, while 54% prefer honorifics (33% don't care). Our entire goal is to make reading visual novels a more pleasant experience. From our review poll, this was a highly utilized and appreciated mechanic. If anyone sees other similar issues, please let me know and we'll try to brainstorm solutions!

Those look really interesting! If you can dm me more information about them, I'd be more than happy to take a look.

There will be!

@Dergonu Is there anything specific you're interested in? We're planning on handling most things just like we did before.

We're on track for a December digital release for Sakura Sakura (with physical goods following early January). I'm glad you guys are excited about Newton! We've all had our eyes on this for a long time, the op drew our attention to it right away.