Japanese market sales compared to Western market sales?

[Dark_blade64]

Alright I'll start by giving out a more detailed explanation about what I'm going on here. As a matter of fact I know already many visual novels from Japan seems to do well here in term of sales, but how much would you say it dictates a visual novel must sell in order to be considered well for a company? I know it differ from company to company but let just say a visal novel over here sell like 2000 copies and get half a million dollar, would that rather count as selling pretty well, so so, or poor?

[Nosebleed]

>Sell 2000 copies and get half a million

Unless your game costs 250 dollars a copy, that's not gonna happen.

If any VN made half a million profit to any company (excluding AAA developers), I think it could be considered successful. It really depends on how much budget was put in the game though. If your game cost half a million to make and you only made half a million back, you've just broken even, for example.

[DarkZedge]

I'd say it depends on how big the company is and the budget the Vn itself had not to mention a bunch of other expenses...If that ammount covers those and leaves at least  some profit then i can consider it a success but that's just my line of thinking

Just now, Nosebleed said:

Unless your game costs 250 dollars a copy, that's not gonna happen.

That is true too though, so we'd have to look at some more realistic numbers in terms of sales and pricing to know

[CeruleanGamer]

If a VN company is smart, they wouldn't solely rely on just their VNs alone. I read some companies who promote their other products by personally selling merchandise related to the characters and stuff on their VN especially the heroines. If your VN is sci-fi or anything to do with robots, try to cash in with that. Like Muv Luv for example, they are big on their Tactical Surface Fighters and BETAs and actually sell plastic model kits for those. Pretty sure they make a ton of revenue from that.

[Dark_blade64]

8 minutes ago, Nosebleed said:

>Sell 2000 copies and get half a million

Unless your game costs 250 dollars a copy, that's not gonna happen.

If any VN made half a million profit to any company (excluding AAA developers), I think it could be considered successful. It really depends on how much budget was put in the game though. If your game cost half a million to make and you only made half a million back, you've just broken even, for example.

I was just trying to give an example...

Now I know it depends how much money you have throw towards your project, but we are talking here about projects that have already be made in Japan and are just being translated. Surely the cost will be less than the initial cost so the amount of money to make any profit would be less aswell. Or at least that I assume?

[Nosebleed]

You'd be surprised at how much licensing a game can cost, especially if you translate it from scratch. Prices can vary wildly even then.

You have to pay fees to the voice actors and to the company and sometimes that can be a lot of money.

[Dark_blade64]

Just now, Nosebleed said:

You'd be surprised at how much licensing a game can cost, especially if you translate it from scratch. Prices can vary wildly even then.

You have to pay fees to the voice actors and to the company and sometimes that can be a lot of money.

Yeah that is something I have considered aswell too, yet many people say most vn sold over here do pretty good although they don't sell that many copies, but I've heard selling like 2000-3000 copies is still good for many of them or something so I got curious.

[Darklord Rooke]

5 minutes ago, Nosebleed said:

You'd be surprised at how much licensing a game can cost, especially if you translate it from scratch. Prices can vary wildly even then.

You have to pay fees to the voice actors and to the company and sometimes that can be a lot of money.

Hasn’t there been all sorts of talk regarding what price Key used to demand for the privilege of localising their games? Wasn't it an arm and leg from every member of the localisation studio, the first born of the CEO, and a thousand souls nabbed from the recently departed (stored in a jar with a rubber seal for convenient transportation.)

[Nosebleed]

2 minutes ago, Dark_blade64 said:

Yeah that is something I have considered aswell too, yet many people say most vn sold over here do pretty good although they don't sell that many copies, but I've heard selling like 2000-3000 copies is still good for many of them or something so I got curious.

Again it's all relative to which VN it is because there's no absolute "success" value (well, if you sell 1 million copies I guess that's an undeniable success regardless of the VN). For a small doujin VN, selling 3k or 4k copies is probably really good. For big names like, say, the Grisaia series, selling 5k is likely just okay-ish since the investment that went into the latter was much bigger.

[Dark_blade64]

3 minutes ago, Nosebleed said:

Again it's all relative to which VN it is because there's no absolute "success" value (well, if you sell 1 million copies I guess that's an undeniable success regardless of the VN). For a small doujin VN, selling 3k or 4k copies is probably really good. For big names like, say, the Grisaia series, selling 5k is likely just okay-ish since the investment that went into the latter was much bigger.

If you sold 1 million copies of a vn you would probably become a king.... Okey Dokey! That gives me more of an idea about how the vn market works in the west. Thanks for replying!

[Xilium]

2 hours ago, CeruleanGamer said:

If a VN company is smart, they wouldn't solely rely on just their VNs alone. I read some companies who promote their other products by personally selling merchandise related to the characters and stuff on their VN especially the heroines. If your VN is sci-fi or anything to do with robots, try to cash in with that. Like Muv Luv for example, they are big on their Tactical Surface Fighters and BETAs and actually sell plastic model kits for those. Pretty sure they make a ton of revenue from that.

That's more or less what anime has become, a means of advertising LNs/mangas and merchandise since the profit margins are a lot higher on those than with anime. It works for anime because of how mainstream it is but VNs would have a much harder time with that, especially in the west. Some VNs can make the transition to anime and become very popular from that, which would lead to better merchandising opportunities, but those seem to be few and far between (the Fate series for instance).

[Clephas]

Considering average initial revenue, I can't see the average charage/moege costing much more than $120,000 to make.  Most companies reuse the same game engines over and over (with cosmetic differences), and Kirikiri is still the most common core engine out there, so programming-wise, it is not nearly as costly as making a 'real' video game.  Art and VAs are probably the biggest expenses in there, followed by writers, lol. 

[Decay]

Most companies have yearly development cycles. They release a game every .75-1 years. Some take longer, some push out plenty of low budget crap at a faster pace. But when I consider that they (presumably) have to pay living wages to their core team, plus freelancers, plus overhead, I imagine these yearly VNs cost much more than $120,000. I would need salary figures and that kind of thing to figure this out, but $120,000 just sounds too cheap to me.

[Darklord Rooke]

10 minutes ago, Decay said:

Most companies have yearly development cycles. They release a game every .75-1 years. Some take longer, some push out plenty of low budget crap at a faster pace. But when I consider that they (presumably) have to pay living wages to their core team, plus freelancers, plus overhead, I imagine these yearly VNs cost much more than $120,000. I would need salary figures and that kind of thing to figure this out, but $120,000 just sounds too cheap to me.

Be careful to keep in mind that the conceptual, pre-production, and post-production stage traditionally (in the gaming world) have a lot fewer staff on board. Things ramp up for full production then ramp down for post production. Core staff would then be transferred to a different project, and freelancers would have their work complete. 

[Decay]

Of course. If they release one game a year, then you can consider the yearly upkeep of the company as the cost to produce one game, regardless of how they shift staff around projects. Management staggers projects and shifts staff around them so they can keep employees working all year round, regardless of what their role is. But I also understand that Japanese employees in Otaku industries tend to do a lot of moonlighting, so I'm not sure how many "full time" employees you can say your average eroge studio has.

Either way, $120,000 sounds way too cheap for your average charage.

[Darklord Rooke]

True, okay we can always reference that old interview with that dude from Minori:

Quote

Questioner: How much does it cost to create a bishoujo-ge?
nbkz: Speaking as a person who looks after the budgeting at our studio, if you want to preserve a degree of quality it cost 30,000,000 yen and upwards. (About USD $321,165 and upwards).

The minimum team in a studio is illustrator, colouring, writer, director is about 5 persons if these people double-up for other roles. Each of these cost 250,000* yen a month, assuming it takes one year to complete a full-priced game (= 8,800 yen). So that’s 15,000,000 yen for the core-team. Then outsource music, sounds, programming, backgrounds, for 4,000,000 yen. Promotion video, leaflets, posters, transport & other expenses is another 1,500,000yen. Rent, lighting, gas, postage and other operational costs to sustain company is 3,600,000 yen. So all up that’s a total of 24,100,000. Now add press advertisements, polls and other miscellaneous factors, including insurance for the employees, it works out to be 30,000,000 yen minimal. Different titles vary in price a lot. Supipara costed us over 100,000,000 yen. (About USD$1,070,550)

Questioner: 100 million yen?! Why did it cost so much??
nbkz: The most expensive are the CGs. (goes on to say how CGs are much harder work than anime frames)
nbkz: Moving from 800×600 to 1920×1080 was a major increase in our costs. (goes on to explain why higher res cost more)

http://blog.fuwanovel.net/2013/02/the-unstoppable-downfall-of-the-bishoujo-ge-industry-interview-with-nbkz-producer-at-minori/

http://biz-journal.jp/2013/02/300.html

*It's 250,000 yen a month, not year, I corrected it in the above paragraph.

So about 300k for a decent game, with the price going up depending how good you want to make it? Funnily enough, 300k is what was pledged to the Megatokyo team, so let's hope they can produce something decent with that money.

[Decay]

$300k was around what I was guesstimating in my head. Minori spending over a million on a short title like Supipara doesn't surprise me. It's part of the reason why they almost went bankrupt. Their production values are literally the best in the entire industry, to the company's detriment.

[Clephas]

Most VN companies hire their writers/artists on a contractual basis, and those people generally also write/illustrate LNs, Manga, etc under different names.   A lot of writers and artists will work for five or six companies in a matter of two or three years, on several different projects.  It is pretty rare for a writer or artist to be salaried in the traditional sense of the word.  Of course, there are companies like Light, Caramel Box, and Nitroplus that have permanent staff that rarely if ever work anywhere else... but those companies also tend to make larger profits in the long run.  Light's secondary team is all over the place (Maggot Baits and a few other VNs last year), though Masada is apparently signed exclusively with them.  Every company has their own methodology, but if you check out the scenario writers in various companies' projects, you'll notice that only a minority of companies actually use the same writers for all or most of their VNs (and most writers aren't company-exclusive). 

Edit: Of course, my idea of the average charage is this: https://vndb.org/v14763 

In other words, short with relatively few CGs (all but one or two of them h-ones).