A wild Dovac appears!

[Narcosis]

48 minutes ago, Chuee said:

Well, yes. I work on translations for them and don't have to rely on these wild and crazy "speculation theories". Plenty of companies really like them, and I know of a decent number of Japanese titles they have or are looking into getting, so the idea that they're looking to stop is frankly ridiculous. Petty internet drama isn't going to magically ruin their reputation among Japanese developers. 

that's what I hope for - that they won't stop, no matter what. I have some high expectations, mainly due to them being open to bring small and solid doujin titles more than any other company around, aside from Fruitbat Factory. Let's be honest - they grew up from two people into a small company; they have certain skills other companies don't have, because they approach their job on a more personal level.

[Nandemonai]

5 hours ago, Narcosis said:

Eitherway, we're on the rise of a new trend. It's hard to predict what will future hold for us, but it's one where publishing companies are slowly losing their ground against in-house publishing. This is especially prevalent for the japanese devs, as they tend to minimize production costs as much as possible and many of them don't even have the budget, nor reputability to strike a deal with large publishing companies. It's where Mangagamer, Jast and SP took the liberty of handling all the middleman processes, but with the rise of digital distribution and better workload methods, their influence is clearly diminishing. As much as right now we're seeing more vn's published than ever, it might as well be the highest point publishing companies managed to reach; soon enough, more and more studios will begin to handle publishing all by themselves, following in-house translations and companies like Jast and MG might find it harder and harder to actually secure good licensing deals, because all of the major players on the japanese market won't be needing them anymore.

Fortunately, their market is preety big and I don't think any of this will happen anytime soon.

Sure, this is happening, but I have a hard time seeing it squeeze Sekai Project / MangaGamer / Jast out of the market completely.  Okay, an outfit like Kodansha can dispense with contracting out to a third party localization group that knows what it's doing, because Kodansha knows what it's doing.  Kodansha's a huge publishing conglomerate, they've translated things into English before.  But more often than not, when the Japanese have run the show, the result has been highly questionable translations.  I mean, MangaGamer itself is proof of that point; they had to bring on experienced native English-speaking staff in order to turn the ship around.  MoeNovel ... IMHHW had to have been approved for release in its current state by people who did not understand how bad it was.

It's going to be hard for Japanese b-game companies (which are usually small and have rapidly-shifting staff makeups) to get the in-house expertise to know when they get good translators, and when they get bad.  Eventually they'll catch on to this fact, and (the smaller ones especiaily) will start looking for a group of translators that have done this kind of work before.  Well, what is that but a localization outfit?  Might as well sign with MangaGamer and take advantage of their programming team to handle the port for you.

Yeah, there are large parts of the industry that have consolidated into big groups, and those big groups will be big enough to have a localization arm.  However, that already describes MangaGamer (which essentially IS the localization arm of a Japanese company) , and we know MangaGamer has been successful enough that at least one other company has approached them and said "please translate our stuff for us" (Hentai Industries, was it?  The really small nukige company.)

Edited November 27, 2016 by Nandemonai