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WEE Episode 3 - Sekai Project's Unwanted Child


Nosebleed

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Link to the original author's blog post: https://cythoplazma.wordpress.com/2016/01/29/sekai-projects-unwanted-child/

While I'm not one to get on the SP bash hype train, I did find this post on Reddit to be a pretty good analysis of SP's past, present and future and how they handle their releases and it exposes a lot of the problems their business model tends to encounter, something that's becoming more apparent with Root Double's rather deplorable Kickstarter which seems to be set for failure as there's only 6 days left and they're still falling almost 40k dollars short.

This post deals mostly with World End Economica episode 3, a VN that was funded on Kickstarter almost 2 years ago on June 2014 and is still only 10% complete while SP is still pushing out more and more Kickstarter campaigns, leaving the backers of their initial projects kind of concerned.

Actual post: 

Quote

 

In June of 2014, the former fan translation group launched a Kickstarter campaign in an effort to translate the rest of Hasekura Isuna’s visual novel series World End Economica. Its first episode, which was originally published on DLSite, made a fan out of me instantly, but for this Kickstarter I wasn’t completely sure whether I wanted to part with the money. What made me change my mind though was seeing the company’s CEO go out of his way to arrange a DRM-free tier. A company that actually listens to its customers and gets shit done? I was on board.

World End Economica was Sekai Project’s first Kickstarter project aimed at localizing a Japanese game. Since then they have launched several other Kickstarters and released an unprecedented amount of other games on Steam. By the end of 2014 they managed to release 8 titles. In 2015, however, they released 27 games, not all of them visual novels, but an impressive amount nonetheless. One could argue that without the company’s early Kickstarter successes they wouldn’t be anywhere near as successful as they are now. But one inescapable issue remains: for almost all of their Kickstarters they have yet to fully produce localizations and issue backer rewards, as is also the case with World End Economica. The company is still struggling to release episode 03, while the project’s end is nowhere in sight.

World End Economica was originally projected to ship in May 2015. The whole project that is, including various mobile and video game console ports. The only tangible part of the project that was released was episode 02 for PC in late July 2015. Since then, there’s been almost no progress made. Sekai Project went silent after the release, probably thinking they deserve a break. On October 6 they finally made contact with their backers. The third episode was supposedly 7.39% complete and they were in the process of on-boarding a new translator. Okay, small progress, but progress nonetheless. Or was there any progress at all?

Word had got out that the former translator had taken time off to deal with personal issues as early as last New Years, which was the main cause of the delay. As a backer, I would have felt more at ease had the company outlined their production difficulties in reasonable time. Still, the reality was that the project was heavily behind schedule. The expectation was that the project gets back on track and starts reporting some good news soon. Instead, in a production update made on November 7 the company wrote the following statement:

Our new translator has finished reading episode.01 and episode.02 and will start working on episode.03 full time next week. At this rate we’re looking at an estimated 6 month turn around for getting the game out to backers.

So it took the new translator a full month to read two short visual novel episodes, something which should have taken less than a week. Notice also how the verb work is used in a future tense. Backers, including myself, had enough and shot back. One backer raised questions over the promised Vita/iOS tiers, to which the project creator responded with a passively aggressive dismissal. It sounded almost resentful, in a “just take your money and go” kind of way, as if us backers didn’t want the project to succeed.

Sekai Project issued a quick response two days later. Even though backers had to pressure them to get as much, they did respond. To alleviate our concerns, they supposedly put a backup translator in place just to hit a self-instated four-month deadline. Our questions in the comments were answered. The plan sounded good, the company was communicating with us again. The clock started ticking.

December’s production update wasn’t verbose. The company’s translation progress page – which doesn’t inspire a whole lot of confidence in its current iteration – supposedly listed episode 03 at 8.26%. Then 2016 came around. Even though Sekai Project stated backers would be updated monthly, they didn’t follow through their own update schedule and backers haven’t been briefed since December. Just yesterday though, the company posted on Redditthat translation for episode 03 is roughly 10% done. It’s been two and a half months since plans to translate the episode were laid out. The four-month window is rapidly closing and I honestly can’t see how the project team will be able to hit their goals in the time they have left.

Delays in visual novel productions happen all the time (just ask Japan), but what makes World End Economica’s case particularly tragic is that Sekai Project built their entire future off the shoulders of its Kickstarter campaign. They got good press for it and they roped in the novel’s backers to their other Kickstarters, yet this particular Kickstarter that started it all is being neglected month after month.

I think Sekai Project has several structural problems that only became apparent as delays increased. Many of us have expressed concerns that perhaps bootstrapping as many localizations as they did in such a short amount of time wasn’t good for the projects they already had on their way, but as Sekai Project commented that has nothing to do with production due to the parallelized way their projects are set up. Even though having teams that don’t interfere with each other sounds ideal and all, it took the new translator one whole month to read through both episodes because apparently he or she was finishing up previous commitments to other projects. This is clearly a human resources problem. When a company is offering near-minimum wage to its potential employees, it’s harder to find somebody competent to fill a spot on the fly.

The other problem is cash flow related. Sekai Project’s recently launched Kickstarters have featured expensive, arguably overpriced pledge tiers compared to tiers of their past projects. Root Double is the perfect example. Even though the game is already being translated and doesn’t really need Kickstarter money, tiers still have ridiculous prices attached to them. While rumors circulate that this is because of high licensing fees, I have a hard time believing that to be the biggest reason. I think the more likely answer is that Sekai Project doesn’t want to lose money on every Kickstarter, as that has admittedly been the case. One of their staffers said they want to make sure to cover all their bases, thus avoid as much risk as possible. I can understand that. I mean, World End Economica was initially set at only $22,000, which is ridiculously low compared to Root Double’s $135,000. A crazy price hike, but in all honesty completely warranted for a game that doesn’t look like it would hit it off well with the Sakura Spirit crowd.

In turn, a business model that relies on post-Kickstarter sales will inherently cause cash flow problems, meaning the company will rather spend their time and resources on new inventory which is more likely to increase cash flow than old inventory. While Sekai Project says every one of their game projects has its own production team, I have my doubts they are keeping funding separate to each of them. In other words, if Sekai Project were to close their doors tomorrow, I doubt the translator would still be working on episode 03 to hit that four-month deadline.

While I appreciate the efforts made by Sekai Project so far – in fact I’ve been hanging out with some of their staffers online for almost ten years now and I hate it has come to this – this project and its backers have to be treated with respect. A translation progress of one percent per month is not good enough, and some of their projects, as bold as they were, were walking a very fine line between success and bankruptcy. I’d like them to avoid the latter because they have been a net positive on the industry, it’s just frustrating to see them peddling new games every month. Meanwhile, the title that put them on the map gets neglected at the expense of backers that initially believed in them.

 

Thoughts?

Personally this is why I don't fund anything on Kickstarter (that and it rejected my card the first time I tried to back a project), it's a dangerous thing to invest in and could easily end up making you lose money and lately it feels like companies such as Sekai Project mostly use it not have to invest internal funds into their releases, which, as we can see, can  only get you so far in the industry before it starts causing trouble.

I do not wish for Sekai Project to go bankrupt in the slightest, but it worries me how they seem to be taking a hit in their efficiency due to their ambitions.

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12 minutes ago, Nosebleed said:

Even though the game is already being translated and doesn’t really need Kickstarter money

I think it does "really need" kickstarter money. Licensing the game/voices and paying for translation costs :D Even if the game is translated, translators should get their money.

WEE was one of their first projects. As we can see in the latest ones, they're still struggling with tier adjusting/reawrds etc. The bigger the game, the more informations people will get, WEE was kinda small in that regard. Still, holding the release for so long is not good for the "Sekai Project" They should set their priorities better.

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I dont support Sekai Project kickstarters because there's not much communication with them post-launch (if the campaign actually gets funded) plus their tier rewards suck ass. They just don't reward you hard enough despite being a loyal pledger. You are already making me wait for 1 year or more.... so at least suck it up and give me some incentive to fund your shitty campaign, Sekai Project.

Other than Muv Luv and Kyuuketsuki no Libra, I haven't done shit to assist kickstarting VNs. Because it's easy to predict when a project is gonna flop like a fat kid doing slip n' slide when the funding has been struggling on the first 2 weeks and last 2 weeks. 

I want to know what I'm investing in and always want constant communication with project starters in all the details even if it's just letting us know like where the money is going like marketing/PR campaigns, translation status, and stuff. Heck, I'll take a picture of the cute voice actresses signing autographs like what onomatope*/@MiKandi Japan have been doing with Libra over nothing. It really gives me a peace of mind when something is shown and effort is being put into something no matter how small. 

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Kickstarter is always a gamble, one must do some research before committing any money. Which, at the time, wasn't really possible with Sekai Project. So a lot of people made the leap of faith (sadly I was one of these poor blokes) and ended up getting burned. Now with hindsight Sekai Projects has shown its' ineptitude with several blunders, which individually could be forgiven, but they continue to be added up and no sign has been shown of any reasonable improvements. Sekai Project is now below Jast and Mangagamer in my books, I still don't hate it.... but now I have complicated feelings whenever they release info about a upcoming project that I have interest in.  

I'm still greatfull for Sekai Project, because they have shown that there is a market for visual novels in the west. It is possible that titles such as Muv Luv and Libra of the Vampire Princess would never have set up their own kickstarters without Sekai Projects early successes.

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MangaGamer and JAST at least attempt to communicate if/when issues occur. SP just goes dead silent, which clearly inspires all the faith in the world. They've needed better PR for a while now, and it looks like they just don't care.

"I backed World End Economica, and I haven't even recieved episode one. I've emailed them, I've commented on their updates about it, I've messaged them on kickstarter. But it's a goddamn black hole over there. I just want my damn game. It's asinine that I got episode 2, but not the first episode"

^ That right there is something that should never happen.

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Grisaia was the first and last KS i backed from them after all these problem i had with that. Their shity PR and communication about R18 and some other things is just the icing on the cake.

So far its also still not known if "g senjou no maou" ever gets a digital R18 release and the same applies to their future projects that also have uncut versions.

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47 minutes ago, Soulless Watcher said:

I'm still greatfull for Sekai Project, because they have shown that there is a market for visual novels in the west. It is possible that titles such as Muv Luv and Libra of the Vampire Princess would never have set up their own kickstarters without Sekai Projects early successes.

Early successes? More like, knowing "WHAT NOT TO DO when you are starting a kickstarter campaign" and actually doing stuff that SP thought wasn't worth doing. While Muv Luv Team and onomatope* may have gotten support from SP through social media and publicity, they were in touch and willing to answer questions and concerns and in a timely manner unlike SP. 

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2 minutes ago, CeruleanGamer said:

Early successes? More like, knowing "WHAT NOT TO DO when you are starting a kickstarter campaign" and actually doing stuff that SP thought wasn't worth doing. While Muv Luv Team and onomatope* may have gotten support from SP through social media and publicity, they were in touch and willing to answer questions and concerns and in a timely manner unlike SP. 

In the end all the little details don't really matter, what matters to corporations and companies is money. What I meant was they were successes in terms of the money they were able to get from the kickstarters. Sekai Project showed that there was a bunch of otaku in the west that were willing to shell out ridiculous amount of money for visual novel localizations. If sekai project didn't exist and those numbers on their early kickstarters didn't exist the Muv Luv Team and Onomatope may have considered (or not even considered) a kickstarter to be worthwhile.

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16 minutes ago, Soulless Watcher said:

In the end all the little details don't really matter, what matters to corporations and companies is money. What I meant was they were successes in terms of the money they were able to get from the kickstarters. Sekai Project showed that there was a bunch of otaku in the west that were willing to shell out ridiculous amount of money for visual novel localizations. If sekai project didn't exist and those numbers on their early kickstarters didn't exist the Muv Luv Team and Onomatope may have considered (or not even considered) a kickstarter to be worthwhile.

Because they did one good thing makes them immune to critism? Sorry it does not work that way. They are by far the worst in terms of handling commucation with their costumer. If you ask them anything and you are really lucky you may get answer after 1-2 weeks.

Mikandi did a way better job compared to every other ks from SP. They had multiple AMAs, answered question on other social media plattforms and listend to critism and good suggestions instead of playing the all knowning god.

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26 minutes ago, Soulless Watcher said:

In the end all the little details don't really matter, what matters to corporations and companies is money. What I meant was they were successes in terms of the money they were able to get from the kickstarters. Sekai Project showed that there was a bunch of otaku in the west that were willing to shell out ridiculous amount of money for visual novel localizations. If sekai project didn't exist and those numbers on their early kickstarters didn't exist the Muv Luv Team and Onomatope may have considered (or not even considered) a kickstarter to be worthwhile.

Little things matter such as publicity and customer loyalty. We live in a social world now, so it's hard to ignore and run away from it.... If SP is being an ass to customers and stay in the dark and making them worried all the time, if a company who does a better job at things comes by, everyone will come flocking AWAY from SP. They got all these ways to contact and keep in touch through multiple social medias with their customers and still fail hard. 

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In marriage counseling they say that it takes multiple favors to counterbalance a single slight.  Humans are hardwired to recall grievances more strongly than favors done.  All it takes is a few of these negative experiences to completely ruin Sekai Project's ability to Kickstart future projects, no matter how well they do with other projects.  Trust is hard to win and easy to lose, and it looks like Sekai Project's stock is plummeting. 

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I've only ever been close to backing them with Grisaia because I love it and wanted it to succeed, but I saw it was doing fine for itself. This was before I saw their blatant abuse of Kickstarters for every single VN they license. Eventually, they're gonna stop making their backing and lose money because of bad PR and various other problems. I see them going bankrupt in the near future if they keep up this mindset. Hell, it took them 3 weeks just to get the tiers right for Root Double. They should've been that way from the beginning. Maybe then they wouldn't be struggling with it right now. I don't hate Sekai Project as it might sound like, but they need to fix these problems if they want to gain the respect of the community and stay alive in general.

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I might be completely misinformed on this, but... why would they stop? The worst that could happen to them is for their games to stop being funded. If that happened... Well, too bad, let's move on to the next one. Worst comes to pass they change their business model, with no real loss beyond things going slower than before.

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The problem seems to be them trying to do so many games at once. It's not as simple as "let's move on to the next one".

Despite them saying they have parallel teams that work independetly, it's clear that it's not working out the way they intended it to, otherwise whenever a game got funded, all the funding would go to one single team and the game would get released in time, but they probably mix the funds in some way and have been losing some of the money because of it, otherwise they wouldn't have to raise the bar so high with Root Double.

Not to mention we know some of their staff work in multiple projects, as mentioned in the above post, so there's bound to be some issues, likely due to there not being enough staff, which ultimately results in them losing money because they can't keep up with demand.

"Moving on to the next one" is exactly what they shouldn't do if they want to stay afloat.

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11 minutes ago, Tiagofvarela said:

I might be completely misinformed on this, but... why would they stop? The worst that could happen to them is for their games to stop being funded. If that happened... Well, too bad, let's move on to the next one. Worst comes to pass they change their business model, with no real loss beyond things going slower than before.

Companies who keep releasing failures are only hurting themselves. It's not as simple as "move onto the next one" while doing the same exact bullshit approaches. That's the very definition of "insanity".... 

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22 minutes ago, Tiagofvarela said:

I might be completely misinformed on this, but... why would they stop? The worst that could happen to them is for their games to stop being funded. If that happened... Well, too bad, let's move on to the next one. Worst comes to pass they change their business model, with no real loss beyond things going slower than before.

The more games they take on, the less time and resources they have to focus on their earlier games/kickstarters that aren't fully released, like WEE. 

But yeah, this is the problem with Kickstarter. Since creators are under no obligation to release the finished product by a certain date, they can take their sweet time on things that really shouldn't be taking long. It happens in other kickstarters too, like the feminist frequency video campaign thing, where they're only halfway through producing the videos even though the estimated release for it was 3.5 years ago. 

 

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15 minutes ago, CeruleanGamer said:

Companies who keep releasing failures are only hurting themselves. It's not as simple as "move onto the next one" while doing the same exact bullshit approaches. That's the very definition of "insanity".... 

Nothing has explicitly failed though, unless I am missing something. WEE 3 is regrettable and unfortunate, and SP has had some pretty bad issues on hand, but again, nothing has failed as of yet.  

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30 minutes ago, CeruleanGamer said:

Companies who keep releasing failures are only hurting themselves. It's not as simple as "move onto the next one" while doing the same exact bullshit approaches. That's the very definition of "insanity".... 

I didn't mean that exactly, I just mean all their stuff has already been funded. Theoretically, they could stop doing kickstarters and they'd stay afloat (not necessarily localising new stuff, just working on what they already have).

People seem to be thinking: "Soon enough their games will stop being funded. That'll show them!" when in all actuality all that means is that they'll either move to the next one, or stop, with no real loss on their side. "Noone wants our games, bohoo :vinty:".

This may be all theoretical on my part, but that's why I don't understand this "They're hurting themselves!" mentality.

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wee2´s overall quality, or to be more precise the lack of anything that comes near such terminus, is something that still angers me to a darn great extend, simply because those fellows have spend almost 1year on a novel which is much shorter than its precedessor and yet managed to screw up big time, with all those legions of typos roaming around plus an english that reads stiff/lifeless at best. possible retranslation of the triology and whatsnot aside, this is by no fucking means something which should be offered to people actually paying for it, especially after it took them so freaking long finishing it up. basically saying i dont fucking about it getting improved future-wise, when the reality is me having backed/payed for a product thats been offered to i in a non satisfying quality aka my first read/playthrough got already ruined... lets all keep on pretending those "editors" were professionals and for them proofreaders non beeing distracted by fapping to a bunch of catgirls :/

edit: the size of a game, or its popularity is and should by no fucking means be a reason of priorizing one over another, especially after it got kickstarted. by doing so you do also priorize its customers, which is pretty much the very worst/aweful thing to happen.

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37 minutes ago, solidbatman said:

Nothing has explicitly failed though, unless I am missing something. WEE 3 is regrettable and unfortunate, and SP has had some pretty bad issues on hand, but again, nothing has failed as of yet.  

But unfunded projects can't be called a success either. In fact, you can consider it a loss technically because the time and money invested marketing these campaigns could have been allocated somewhere else. And as someone who works in a marketing field, it's not exactly cheap (we marketing managers can get paid way more than doctors depending on the firms we work for and what kind of advertising/marketing campaign is at hand). Failed campaigns also take up unnecessary space (facebook updates, tweets, etc) or front pages when it could have been used to promote their existing products instead. 

24 minutes ago, Tiagofvarela said:

This may be all theoretical on my part, but that's why I don't understand this "They're hurting themselves!" mentality.

Ever heard the quote, "It takes years to build a good reputation but seconds to destroy it?" That's what I meant by it.

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Taking the risk to lose money is inherent to the very principle of investment. If anything, that kind of setback and the "risk of failure" Root Double encountered shows that Sekai Project did in fact need Kickstarter to dilute some risk onto their backers (which is, kind of, the principle of Kickstarter).

None of their project have actually failed yet. I don't see the need to get into alert over SP as a whole over one case of setback.

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2 hours ago, sanahtlig said:

In marriage counseling they say that it takes multiple favors to counterbalance a single slight.  Humans are hardwired to recall grievances more strongly than favors done.  All it takes is a few of these negative experiences to completely ruin Sekai Project's ability to Kickstart future projects, no matter how well they do with other projects.  Trust is hard to win and easy to lose, and it looks like Sekai Project's stock is plummeting. 

They've recently put out an abomination of a kickstarter, with no worthwhile high tiers and few rewards, corrected their position in only the last 7 days of the campaign, and still look to raise the 150,000 or whatever it is they need with thousands of people donating. This doesn't seem to me as a company who's stock is plummeting. People will point to a transgender, boy love kickstarter as 'proof' of the community's feelings against Sekai, but these people are either being disingenuous or they're naive. Boy love is niche within a niche, and the transgender aspect partly negates that niche, so it was always going to fail (imo.)

WE3 is regrettable, but Batman here has the right of it. They haven't actually had any failures yet, and the hardcore communities 'angst' hasn't materialised into anything worthwhile. So either a) the hardcore community isn't as powerful as they think or b) it's only a small, but noisy portion of the hardcore community. The latest game they're publishing is some 2d weird actiony RPG game, and not at all a VN which is interesting.

Sekai need to get their act together on WE3 though. They've definitely made some mistakes.

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13 minutes ago, CeruleanGamer said:

Ever heard the quote, "It takes years to build a good reputation but seconds to destroy it?" That's what I meant by it.

That implies they ever had one.
Now, companies look at profits/results, not reputation (at least, these random Japanese ones with no knowledge of English). A successful kickstarter theoretically means profits. If they stop having successful kickstarters (due to bad fame with the masses), that means companies will stop coming to them. That means they stop localising games. Their loss will amount to bad management and expenditure on the failed kickstarter campaigns.

Sekai Project will not be doomed to hell if they lose their reputation.  On the other hand, we, the people, will probably lose more.

I've seen a funny analogy where Sekai's kickstarter campaigns were compared to holding games hostage, and I think it sort of works. If we refuse to fund their games, the kickstarter will fail. If it fails, it'll forever be remembered that it failed. Having this black spot on the record, and such a huge pool of Japanese games to choose from, it hypothetically guarantees that it'll never be officially localised, said game.

 

So long as Sekai's business practices work, they will continue to make use of them. When they stop working, they won't incur too much in terms of damage, and at worst they'll just disband and do something else. Not drown in debt. And we, who want English games, are the parties who suffer the most damage. That is my point of view.

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