Chrono Clock Sudden Kickstarter Announced

[sanahtlig]

9 minutes ago, Rooke said:

Libra of the Vampire Princess was shoved down everybody's throats until they got their 180k. Most SP's other successful kickstarters were already famous with fan-translations available.

But that's beside the point. The point is that a certain segment of the community though Kickstarter was borderline dead, then here comes SP with a title few people know of and almost zero advertising easily topping 80k and will probably end up over 100k. That's significant, it shows that Kickstarter is still a very viable route for people to go down.

Libra did well because MiKandi JP is a likable publisher.  They earned that support because of their attention to what fans wanted and their ability to galvanize fans to rally around them.

$100k is not good.  That won't cover costs for most professional VN localization projects for titles of any significant length.  It wouldn't fund Shin Koihime Musou, for example, which is a title that MangaGamer continues to avoid because they don't think they could recoup costs on it.

[Darklord Rooke]

3 minutes ago, sanahtlig said:

$100k is not good.  That won't cover costs for most professional VN localization projects for titles of any significant length.  It wouldn't fund Shin Koihime Musou, for example, which is a title that MangaGamer continues to avoid because they don't think they could recoup costs on it.

It would depend on the developer. I can see it not being enough to make a deal with big name companies, but to be honest I think big name companies are looking more and more to bring titles over independently.

For smaller companies the localisation fees will be smaller which will make 100k more viable. If people expected 300k - 1million was going to be the norm for kickstarters based on how a few VNs did (which were beloved to the community with much hype surrounding them) then I would say those expectations were unrealistic.

[Zenophilious]

Ooooor...maybe it got funded easily because of Sekai Project being Sekai Project.  They can typically get a base amount off of people that back every major Kickstarter they do.  Looking at the results and going, "Kickstarter fatigue don't real" is kind of a false conclusion to reach based off of one Kickstarter project.  The sample size is waaaaay too small to make that conclusion, IMO.

[ChaosRaven]

15 minutes ago, Rooke said:

Grisaia was a VN beloved by the community and translated by a person regarded as the top VN translator at the time. And are you really comparing the performance of Clannad, by Key with a successful anime and all, with little known Chrono Clock? xD

I think the Kickstarter backers are usually amongst the more well-informed people of the VN community, and Purple Software is currently one of the most popular VN developers in Japan even if Chrono Clock is considered one of their weaker titles. Otherwise Dies might be in for a bad surprise since there are no translated Light titles or animes (yet) and the only thing that's currently there is hype.

21 minutes ago, sanahtlig said:

$100k is not good.  That won't cover costs for most professional VN localization projects for titles of any significant length.

It doesn't have to since they'll sell the title on other platforms later. The Kickstarter campaign is just a way to get some extra money from high spending customers and also acts as a promotion campaign.

[sanahtlig]

41 minutes ago, ChaosRaven said:

It doesn't have to since they'll sell the title on other platforms later. The Kickstarter campaign is just a way to get some extra money from high spending customers and also acts as a promotion campaign.

Tell that to all the companies that presumably won't proceed with the project if the Kickstarter funding goal (meant to cover all costs ahead of time) isn't met.  I agree that demanding all costs be covered in "pre-orders" doesn't make sense if you're an established company that routinely invests money in projects that won't generate income for 12-24 months.  Yet that's exactly what most VN companies on Kickstarter are doing.

[ChaosRaven]

41 minutes ago, sanahtlig said:

Tell that to all the companies that presumably won't proceed with the project if the Kickstarter funding goal (meant to cover all costs ahead of time) isn't met.  I agree that demanding all costs be covered in "pre-orders" doesn't make sense if you're an established company that routinely invests money in projects that won't generate income for 12-24 months.  Yet that's exactly what most VN companies on Kickstarter are doing.

Well, they certainly try to cover all the costs in advance which is just to be expected. If it works is another story though. The KS projects for ChuSingura and Sharin no Kuni paid the price for being too greedy and failed to reach their Kickstarter goal. And yet, they both started (or will start) a retry with a reduced KS goal. ChuSingura even gave up on the KS campaign completely and are now just selling one chapter after another on Steam. It certainly tells a lot about what to think about those 'minimum' required KS goals if they can simply lower it for the next try or just skip it completely.

[Hayashi]

Will this be another great game ruined?

[Mr Poltroon]

9 minutes ago, Kiso said:

Will this be another great game ruined?

Probably. It'll be, like, in English and stuff! All of a sudden the Japanese original will go, like, poof! Ruined!

[Hayashi]

Just now, Mr Poltroon said:

Probably. It'll be, like, in English and stuff! All of a sudden the Japanese original will go, like, poof! Ruined!

Not in that sense, but the accuracy and the quality of the translation are often questioned. 

[Lambda]

4 hours ago, sanahtlig said:

Libra did well because MiKandi JP is a likable publisher.  They earned that support because of their attention to what fans wanted and their ability to galvanize fans to rally around them.

$100k is not good.  That won't cover costs for most professional VN localization projects for titles of any significant length.  It wouldn't fund Shin Koihime Musou, for example, which is a title that MangaGamer continues to avoid because they don't think they could recoup costs on it.

They've been pretty clear that this isn't to fund the localization, though, but the limited edition hardcopy and stuff. They only wanted a minimum quantity of orders and to know exactly how much stuff to make, really. ...Actually, you even mentioned that you don't mind this model when this kickstarter started.So I think it's pretty silly to compare the results here to the results of companies that need the money to go towards localization. Localization has already been paid for, if we believe the PR. The localization was never in jeopardy here, and that's why the goal was low, too. So it's definitely not like most of the vn kickstarters around, to my understanding?

[Soulless Watcher]

2 hours ago, Kiso said:

Not in that sense, but the accuracy and the quality of the translation are often questioned. 

God knows, the translation qualities for official localization are often harder to gage than fan patches since the team behind the translation project is not always known to the public. Typically, in my limited experience, Sekai project is solid in the translation department compared to Jast and Mangagamer. 

[Chuee]

6 hours ago, Rooke said:

That's significant, it shows that Kickstarter is still a very viable route for people to go down.

Eh, kickstarter fatigue has at least kicked in to a degree that failure is a very real possibility unless you have a title everyone and their mom wants and loves. The flexible funding might still make indiegogo a viable option, but I don't think many publishers will want to be reliant on kickstarter to fund the brunt of localization costs. 

 

3 hours ago, Kiso said:

Not in that sense, but the accuracy and the quality of the translation are often questioned. 

They're pretty much no worse than any other publisher. Still miles ahead of the average fan-translation. 

[Nandemonai]

5 hours ago, Lambda said:

They've been pretty clear that this isn't to fund the localization, though, but the limited edition hardcopy and stuff. They only wanted a minimum quantity of orders and to know exactly how much stuff to make, really. ...Actually, you even mentioned that you don't mind this model when this kickstarter started.So I think it's pretty silly to compare the results here to the results of companies that need the money to go towards localization. Localization has already been paid for, if we believe the PR. The localization was never in jeopardy here, and that's why the goal was low, too. So it's definitely not like most of the vn kickstarters around, to my understanding?

Sekai Project may say that, but I'm not quite sure I believe it.  If this really was purely about physical edtions, then why even offer "just the game kthxbai" tiers?  Which were quite popular; more than a third of the backers picked tiers that included just the 18+ digital version of the game, and another 10% picked just the steam version.  Over half the backers picked a tier that didn't include any physical goods whatsoever.

[sanahtlig]

6 hours ago, Lambda said:

They've been pretty clear that this isn't to fund the localization, though, but the limited edition hardcopy and stuff. They only wanted a minimum quantity of orders and to know exactly how much stuff to make, really. ...Actually, you even mentioned that you don't mind this model when this kickstarter started.So I think it's pretty silly to compare the results here to the results of companies that need the money to go towards localization. Localization has already been paid for, if we believe the PR. The localization was never in jeopardy here, and that's why the goal was low, too. So it's definitely not like most of the vn kickstarters around, to my understanding?

You're mixing up different messages.  To clarify:

1. I'm somewhat opposed to crowdfunding in general.  It's anti-consumer and forfeits standard consumer protections.  Professional companies shouldn't rely on it, and if they do use it they should compensate backers appropriately for the risk involved.
2. I'm less opposed to the stated intent of the Chrono Clock Kickstarter campaign, which was to solicit pre-orders to ensure producing the physical items was worth it.  Though as Nandemonai pointed out, this wasn't the ideal way to do this.  Economies of scale apply to production of physical items, especially print runs.  Ideally, stretch goals, if reached, would lower the cost of each tier.  Mixing in digital orders actually distracts from the central purpose.  If the goal was to drive economies of scale and reward backers for promoting the game in their communities, the project wasn't well-conceived to achieve this.
3. I was directly responding to a claim that raising $80k showed that Kickstarter is still "viable" for crowdfunding VNs in general (especially relatively unknown titles).  I argued that the result of this campaign does not support that conclusion, and on the contrary would tend to refute it.

 

 

[Lambda]

10 hours ago, Nandemonai said:

Sekai Project may say that, but I'm not quite sure I believe it.  If this really was purely about physical edtions, then why even offer "just the game kthxbai" tiers?  Which were quite popular; more than a third of the backers picked tiers that included just the 18+ digital version of the game, and another 10% picked just the steam version.  Over half the backers picked a tier that didn't include any physical goods whatsoever.

"If we believe the PR". It's clear that you don't. That's okay. ...In general, though, I do wonder about the backers that chose that option. (Actually, looking at it, it's mainly people who pledged for the Steam copy + Nutaku copy for $30. If they just want both, and it's a lot cheaper that way.)

10 hours ago, sanahtlig said:

You're mixing up different messages.  To clarify:

1. I'm somewhat opposed to crowdfunding in general.  It's anti-consumer and forfeits standard consumer protections.  Professional companies shouldn't rely on it, and if they do use it they should compensate backers appropriately for the risk involved.
2. I'm less opposed to the stated intent of the Chrono Clock Kickstarter campaign, which was to solicit pre-orders to ensure producing the physical items was worth it.  Though as Nandemonai pointed out, this wasn't the ideal way to do this.  Economies of scale apply to production of physical items, especially print runs.  Ideally, stretch goals, if reached, would lower the cost of each tier.  Mixing in digital orders actually distracts from the central purpose.  If the goal was to drive economies of scale and reward backers for promoting the game in their communities, the project wasn't well-conceived to achieve this.
3. I was directly responding to a claim that raising $80k showed that Kickstarter is still "viable" for crowdfunding VNs in general (especially relatively unknown titles).  I argued that the result of this campaign does not support that conclusion, and on the contrary would tend to refute it.

Ah, thanks for clarifying. I thought the flow of conversation was more like "Kickstarter fatigue doesn't exist, cause this game did well!" -> "This game didn't do well, it wouldn't be good if it was a localization company" (I think this part would've been the odd one out here, as I don't think this kickstarter needs to do as well as others in order to "do well" - they have different goals and therefore different methods of achieving them) -> "And kickstarters like this aren't good anyway". I guess I got really confused! I will note that this probably isn't to produce economies of scale in the economic sense, though. I don't think there's a viable way for VNs to do that at any huge benefit? This was probably more to clear minimum product runs for suppliers to create the product. (Edit: Will also note that another huge benefit of this to SP is that they know exactly how many orders to make and they know for a fact that each one of those would sell. That might be the main force behind the kickstarter, anyway. It's similar to the reasoning Mangagamer uses for its physical releases. Therefore, they might not care that digital is a tier, and it's PR anyway.) All of these are for point 2, by the way.

[ChaosRaven]

From their Kickstarter closing comments:

Quote

Now for those of you who might've been interested in a physical copy but not the collector's edition, we are looking into also offering a standard edition of ChronoClock as well. When we have more details we'll definitely let everyone know about it.

Yeah, I guess it was totally impossible to mention that in advance or offer that already in the KS campaign... 

*Sudden urge to strangle someone*

[Soulless Watcher]

 

34 minutes ago, ChaosRaven said:

From their Kickstarter closing comments:

Quote

Now for those of you who might've been interested in a physical copy but not the collector's edition, we are looking into also offering a standard edition of ChronoClock as well. When we have more details we'll definitely let everyone know about it.

Yeah, I guess it was totally impossible to mention that in advance or offer that already in the KS campaign... 

*Sudden urge to strangle someone*

Hahah, you know I wonder how much of this is on purpose and how much is due to incompetence. I'm still really salty over their recent sale on the Fault Milestone BUNDLE, they kept spamming my facebook wall with claims that it was the complete edition! Something that is impossible considering there are at least two more titles in the series being developed. At the time I just assumed it was a case of the intern not giving two shits about the company product, but now I wonder if Sekai is actively pursuing misleading marketing as a way to boost sales.

[Darklord Rooke]

58 minutes ago, Soulless Watcher said:

but now I wonder if Sekai is actively pursuing misleading marketing as a way to boost sales.

It would be pretty stupid of them, considering false advertising laws prohibit presenting misleading claims to deceive (although laws vary from country to country.) 

[Nandemonai]

Never ascribe to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence.

[littleshogun]

Decide to bump my thread here, and right now they already had Steam Store page which indicate that the release was almost near (Hopefully). No much that I could said about delay other than I'll be still waiting for the release there.

[kyrt]

I decided to not back the kickstarter for this game although once it is released and eventually (a month later) released on Denpasoft then I'll probably pick it up. I don't want it on nutaku so if a delay is what I must take then so be it. 

[Darklord Rooke]

I am semi looking forward to this, so I'm going to cross my fingers that the translation wasn't botched  

[MFrost]

Waiting for this, and just saw this, was hoping it'd have a full release too, so is that what Nutaku is for? I don't want a semi-release like Grisia.
I saw on the updates that on Jan 20th they said that it was fully playable without any bugs, so here's rooting!