sanahtlig

I can send you za list of candidates if you'ze got da dough.

"Chinese bucks" are only relevant while the transactions are legal and easy. The Chinese government is doing their best to change this. That uncertainty is likely what's holding the major publishers back from ambitious Chinese releases of the longer 18+ VNs--you never know when the bottom will fall out of the market, and the longer the release window, the greater the risk.

That's not really the main takeaway from the free-to-play market, which would be that a small fraction of players can be conned into spending ridiculous amounts of money when collecting, gambling, and pay-to-win player vs. player competition are involved. It's sort of like saying that the pharmaceutical industry could learn a lot from studying the illegal drug trade.

By "audience", I mean the customers you're trying to sell to and who you expect to account for most of your sales (in monetary currency). People who don't buy your games aren't your audience. Likewise, customers who buy more games at full-price are more valuable than customers who buy fewer games at reduced prices due to less disposable income or cheaper regional pricing. Naturally, companies need to be strategic and follow where the money's at if they're going to be successful. Also, to be clear, fan hubs aren't necessarily representative of the customer base as a whole. For example, I don't think there's much money to be made selling English eroge in Poland, even if prominent members on Fuwa hail from there.

Think of it this way: who is the audience for English eroge? Young males (mainly in the US). What is the situation of young males with time on their hands these days? Usually buried in student loan debt trying to get through university. Do you honestly expect these people to buy eroge on credit? As for the population that doesn't go through university, their wages are generally lower and they have less time--also not a recipe for spending on high-priced time-consuming entertainment that you can only enjoy alone. Simply put, this is a demographics issue that doesn't have an easy solution. A pirated copy isn't a lost sale. Limiting piracy isn't going to increase their entertainment budgets. They'll just find their porn somewhere else. As for why Sol Press specifically might be having profitability issues: just look at their game lineup. They're selling a bunch of medium to long length games that are expensive and time-consuming to translate (and consume). They're all moege, appealing to more or less the same restricted audience. It's one thing to be a developer and stick to what you're good at (creatively). But sticking to one genre or game type doesn't do you much good as a publisher. Diversification spreads your risk and drives traffic from different audiences. That's good for business. It's also important to point out that Sol Press is relatively new and doesn't have much of a following or brand recognition. In addition, VN sales have a long tail in the West, and they don't have enough titles or sales history to benefit from that just yet. As for the article itself, it seems to stumble from one bit of nonsense to another. In what reality is releasing games sooner after the Japanese release going to decrease piracy?

Keep in mind that you're asking detailed questions about a niche within a niche. It's really no surprise that no one would respond. You're asking about Japanese language games. Very few English speakers read Japanese language titles. You're talking about NTR, which is considered an extreme fetish that most players actively avoid. You're asking about a particular game in this niche within a niche that hardly anyone has played, and that requires having played through all endings of the game. (How many people even do this for most games they play?) You're asking a subjective question ("Which endings have happy NTR?") that the very small subset of people who play these games would probably consider ridiculous and/or pointless. In short, you excluded most avenues of response with your question. Try asking questions that aren't so narrowly focused. Or just play the game and deal with the content. NTR Blog (.net for older titles, .com for newer titles) is a pretty good source for NTR game coverage. They probably covered this game and talk about if the game has good endings.

The more this drags on, the more I don't want MangaGamer to be in the position where they're the distribution bottleneck for eroge. It might be better for everyone if publishers focus on publishing and leave distribution to specialists.

Not selling stuff at all also cuts into profits greatly. Selling in multiple shops also offers greater exposure. Trying to maximize profits per sale at any cost overlooks the very real possibility that you're missing large swathes of the market by forcing customers to come to you rather than reaching out to them.

If this is such a problem why don't they sell their games in other digital shops? JAST and FAKKU would probably be more than happy to host everything they sell.

Effort is important. Correcting typos is quick and easy. Rewriting lines is time-consuming and hard (and often thankless). If you hire an editor and (under)pay them by the word--regardless of the quality of their work--expect them to do as little work as possible.

Spend $150 to fix the problem, then remember to buy a desktop PC next time so the fix costs $10. If the original fan failed, it might not be a very good fan. If you're going to spend $150 to fix this, you might as well spend an extra $10 to make sure the fix is permanent. I use fluid bearing fans for their quiet operation and durability.

Kanji are not exactly the barrier they used to be, now that instant lookup is just a mouseover away. Learning Japanese is hard, but kanji is not the main barrier. If anything, the disparate sentence structure and embedded ambiguity are the biggest obstacles to casual learners and machine translation. Contractors are bound by nondisclosure agreements. Given that SP has very carefully withheld information on the topic, they're not going to watch and let their contractors subvert the company line. The problem with waiting until a title is mostly done to announce it is that fan translators could start a project and then refuse to stop (because of sunk costs). A project announcement is also a stake in the ground.

I didn't. I tried Gold back before the 18+ version of Eiyuu Senki was released in English. My experience with Gold left me with little reason to go back and try the original.

Eiyuu Senki Gold's setting was generic and the dialogue was the same tedious comic banter seen in every moe comedy released in the past 10 years. After trudging through that, I encountered a simplistic battle system that left me with no motivation to continue. The entire experience screamed "generic".

I tried Eiyuu Senki Gold. I couldn't make it past the prologue. Yamizome Revenger is decent, but the battles can get repetitive (since your goal isn't to defeat them, but rather to drag out the battles for maximum corruption increase), while the school life parts are pretty episodic and dull.

The VN I dropped the quickest was an NTR game by Material called Boku Igai no Otoko o Shiranai Kanojo. It wouldn't work in Windows 8/10 and they never bothered to patch it (even though Windows 8 released the same month). I also dropped Kimi ga Nozomu Eien fairly quickly due to the constant crashing. I imagine that technical issues are the leading cause of games being dropped within the first hour.

I responded to a particular point of the OP's, taken from a section of his post dedicated to lolicon--discussion of which is indeed forbidden. Each of my responses after that was on the same subject. If you want to talk in generalities or about related topics, go ahead.

First of all, Hata is not me. Second, the discussion of the subject is literally forbidden here. I can talk in generalities about it, but what's the point? The "serious discussion" the OP claims to want simply can't happen here. The End.

Back in the day when Fuwa banned discussions of loli content--provoked by a thread I created. You can read my allegory of that affair, along with a link to what's left of the discussion, in the FuwaHistory thread. Essentially, Tay himself stepped in and decided that the discussion was over. Threats of reporting Fuwanovel to Interpol may or may not have been involved.

Just wanted to reiterate this. I tried to have this discussion back in the day. I was shut down. Reflection was obviously not the priority at the time. Though it doesn't seem to me like you want to "reflect" or have a "discussion". You want others to agree with you. You want those who disagree to be marginalized. And you're leaving because this isn't a battle--what else is it?--you think you can win. Yet here you are, continuing the fight even when you decided that your battle is over. If you want to talk only with people who agree with you, then create a private Discord channel and invite your friends. It'll be a lot less stressful--and probably a lot less interesting.

There's likely some sort of font problem. Do the usual changing of all relevant settings to Japanese. I played this without changing my system language, so you can rule that out.

Sekai Project implied that there was nothing they could do about the issue from their side. That's interesting that the JP side was willing to revisit it after all this time. I wonder what changed their mind.

Seems like it's common nowadays to combine parts of the Japanese title with an English subtitle so both fans and newcomers can easily identify it. One of the most important aspects of a title is its SEO; if the title uses a common phrase, it becomes hard to find related content in search engines. Throwing in some simple Japanese or abbreviation of Japanese helps to make it more unique and memorable.

While this may be true, the English market still has room to grow; we're not yet at the saturation point where everyone who would be interested in VNs is buying them. The Japanese market is. Localization costs are also much lower than producing original content, making it far easier to turn a profit reliably. Also, the explosive success of the Subverse Kickstarter shows that there's a great latent demand for gameplay eroge that exceeds even well-loved VN franchises like MuvLuv. I expect the largest growth in the English market will be in gameplay eroge rather than pure VNs. It remains to be seen whether Japanese devs will be able to capture this market, but their record to date doesn't inspire much confidence.

The relatively small market for Japanese VNs in the West is doing fine. The larger market in Japan seems to be tightening, likely due to shifting demographics, oversaturation, and lack of innovation.