Iro

What kind of games did you buy then Decay? If you like hentai titles then that's understandable. But the vast majority of story VNs are fan translated, not done by english distributors, much less mangagamer. Its not just extrapolating from a sample of one either, just look at vndb, the most popular VNs are story heavy and not hentai titles (nukige?). For example going by the most popular list on vndb, if I wanted to buy Fate/Stay Night, G-senjou no Maou, Saya no Uta, Ever17 or Sharin no Kun. I can't buy it from mangagamer. The next 5 on the list, can't buy from mangagamer. Same thing for the next 5, or the 5 after that. Mangagamer is irrelevant to my and going by this list many other's preference in VNs. Nothing comes in from mangagamer til #26 Kirakira. Now Kirakira I've actually tried bc of good reviews on the net but urgg hated it. Too boring, too much cutsy idol stuff. Deleted before finish. #27 is Kara no Shoujo, I assume this is what sanahtlig means when he says MG's best title. This actually looks interesting and something I might enjoy... maybe. But I would not of known about this if sanahtlig had not mentioned it. Oh by the way this is prob the reason why sanahtlig say Kara no Shoujo had poor sales too. If its so good then Mangagamer should of been putting it on the frontpage, screaming how good it is. I've been to mangagamer's site before and I had no idea mangagamer even had non-hentai/moe titles. Instead the site is just boobs everywhere. In real life people don't go to a sleezy adult book shop to buy a complex murder mystery, and people who buy complex murder mysteries will get turned off by adult book shops you know? Anyways back to the point, vndb has currently 16427 entries of vn's, all of mangagamer's titles combined are not even close to 1% of that, of those most of them are simple hentai titles that aren't very popular. There's tons of untranslated titles that people want that MG isn't even interested in doing. MG frankly has no business telling fansubbers what to do with their spare time. If they wanna complain about poor sales, they should really have a look at how they market non-hentai titles before blaming fansubbing. (I also see credits for TLWiki on the Kara no Shoujo page, did MG even translate this?) What this medium needs is more fansubbers working on fun titles, not less. You can see from other stuff like anime and manga. Its pretty popular around world now mostly due to the work of many generations of dedicated fansubbers. You can even find anime and manga titles on amazon or new york times best seller lists. Meanwhile VNs is the least unpopular of the 3, due to most of it is still in inaccessible Japanese and the bad rep of been associated with pornographic content.

I don't know about that. Have you yourself bought more mangagamer games than import Japanese ones? How does mangagamer even know how many people imported? Are they only comparing them only to the english translated titles they've sold? What about from other distributors like Jast? What about the people already fluent in Japanese or learning Japanese? Didn't the whole fan translation scene start from buying imported titles and translating them in the first place? Personally I've imported a few Japanese titles but bought 0 mangagamers titles. I like VNs with good stories but am turned off by boob heavy VN's like those from mangagamer. I doubt I'm alone in this and if you extrapolate my buying habits, there's prob more people who buy fan-translated/imported Jap releases than english releases especially from manga gamer.

From what I've seen, the companies with the most coercive overbearing attitudes are US based. I do a search for some random anime and its always Funimation taking them down with cease and desist orders. I've never seen one from a Japanese company (eg like Madhouse, which I'm a fan of). I reckon its part of the crazy copyright culture they have in the US, allowing people to copyright or patent everything from genes to rectangles then going around the world enforcing their own crappy laws on everyone. I don't agree with developer companies having the right to interfere with whatever work a fansubber does either. If someone on spare time wants to translate an entire visual novel and release it for free, well I would only applaud and thank them, as they are improving on an existing work and making it accessible to a much wider audience. After all I would never of even heard it if not for the fansubbers. Then if the title is good, I'll buy a copy from playasia or honto to reward the developers but that'll be the end of the matter.

Frankly I haven't seen manga gamer do or plan to do one title I'm interested in. From what I can see from their catalogue its all hentai titles and a few moe titles that I don't want. Even if they disappeared off the planet tommorrow I wouldn't bat an eyelash. What I do have a problem is that all these US companies seems to think they have the right to tell people on the other side of the globe what they can or cannot do for FREE in their spare time. So what if they don't have a good sales figure this quarter? Who cares? Its not our job to look after their bottom line.