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NEKOPARA OVA KICKSTARTER IN 2 DAYS!!!


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1 hour ago, kyrt said:

Kickstarter seems to have become a way for Japanese companies to sell crap that normally could be made and sold much cheaper just about anywhere else rather than the product they are trying to kickstart. When did kickstarter become about memorabilia and licensing rather than new ideas? Shame really. Regardless the amount of money put into this is likely more on the Japanese side of things. I also find it quite likely that this would have happened regardless of the kickstarter and that this is just a quick way for them to make a few quick bucks.

Actually, this is how Japanese companies, anime or VN, have always behaved.  Massively overpriced products with some extras thrown in, like a $0.15 CD of the music or a $0.50 16 page artbook, in an attempt to justify to price.  It's so common, that's it's a really old joke that the more extra stuff a company puts into the release, the worse the game itself is going to be.

 

To a certain extent, the fact that Kickstarter allows them to spell out what you get in tiers and Stretch Goals is nice, because it makes it more obvious and straightforward.

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On 12/29/2016 at 4:29 PM, TexasDice said:

FINALLY.

I have absolutely no idea how this is going to play out (I mean, I do, but that wouldn't be fun..). However, as seen by Nekopara's tendency to subvert a little (the sexy gyaru character turned out to be an imouto ffs), I feel like Cinnamon will turn out to be hard S or something. 

Despite being my favorite design, Maple so far has been really boring. She's sassy, but not as sassy as Vanilla or Azuki. I hope she'll turn out to be interesting in some way (worked for Coconut). Based on that screenshot, it seems as if  Cinnamon and Maple have something going on between each other (although, I personally predict that the two pics of them as kittens are a red herring; I believe these CGs will be flashbacks from the protagonist's POV).

What I'm asking myself, who getting the short stick this time? So far, Nekopara has stuck to one H-scene for each character and a group scene with two of them (Vol1: Chocola -> Vanilla -> Both, Vol2: Chocola+Vanilla -> Coconut -> Azuki).

So if we stick to this format, are we getting a group scene with the four previous catpanions, followed by one Maple scene and one Cinnamon scene? Or will we get three scenes with two cats each? Or simply drop Chocola and Vanilla for this one, because they had the most scenes until now? What about Shigure, how will she fit into the picture, if at all? And if all of them are in bed together, WHO'S DRIVING THE BAKERY?!?!

From the trailer it kind of looks like a Maple and Cinnamon combo is definitely possible. (That's sounds good in more ways than one)

I'm sure we'll have another Chocola + Vanilla scene. Azuki and Coconut will probably get the shaft, but who knows.

I'm hoping they step it up and put a good amount of new content in general. Backgrounds, music, etc. The second game was great, but it felt way too much like the first with so many things recycled.

I will say that Sayori's art continues to get better and better. I know trailers are always dressed up, but if you compare the art from the first game to the trailer it's even more detailed and just seems more HQ. Spring can't come soon enough...

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I'm going to pretend to apologize for this in advance.

10 hours ago, Esto Gaza said:

Azuki and Coconut will probably get the shaft, but who knows.

You'd think Azuki and Coconut would like that, though ...

 

5 hours ago, granit said:

Isn't 100k for subtitles and 200k for a short VN a little too much?

No, not really.  Translation is more expensive than most people think.  Japanese-to-XYZ commonly costs several cents per character.  They're offering six translations for $100K, but you also have to remember that rewards and Kickstarter's cut eat into that hundred grand before it goes to pay any translators.  They also have a significantly more complicated job mastering and testing the blu-ray itself - after all, you don't want the Korean subs to be timed poorly, or to crash on people's players like His and Her Circumstances did - and I have no idea how much that costs.

So it's probably true that a hundred grand is probably not Sekai's cost to add these subtitles, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was much closer than you think.  And I don't really have a problem with that; it is a stretch goal.  People are getting the OVA at a discount.

Incidentally, this is why so few games get released in English compared to the Japanese release.  The cost of a good translation is actually fairly significant, and when the average sales are taken into account, the money often just isn't there.

Edited by Nandemonai
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$100k for translations into six new languages, after you account for Kickstarter fees, payment processing fees, taxes, reward fulfillment, and other misc fees, is perhaps more than they need, but not by a lot. The $200k goal for a mini-VN is much more "overpriced." That will perhaps make up for the fact that $500k minus all previously-mentioned additional expenses isn't actually enough to cover the cost of a 60 minute OVA. Essentially, the stretch goals will compensate for the fact that they are losing money on the first $500k, and that's also fine.

You know, the ideal stretch goal setups are either 1) no stretch goals, or 2) overpriced stretch goals. In both scenarios, they don't exactly inspire tons of additional backers to hop on board, but they do prevent the companies from digging themselves a hole with them, which is actually very common. I've read way too many stories from developers who made promises with stretch goals that later became infeasible, or more expensive than estimated, or for features that turned out to be less interesting than other ideas they later came up with. Often times, even when they are fairly priced, you pigeonhole yourself down a specific path for your company, forcing you to follow through with a plan even if it later turns out that doing something else would be better. 

Like 99% of all kickstarters end up with the companies doing the kickstarting taking a loss. They're expensive to run, and they almost always don't generate enough money to cover all of your development expenses. They make their KS goals less than what they need and then take huge pay cuts or even cover the rest out of pocket. Too many of these companies price their stretch goals with the same philosophy they price the lowballed base goals. "Asking for $50k for this feature that actually costs $100k will allow us to fit in more stretch goals, which will get people more excited to give us money!" They continue to balloon the size and scope of their project while getting only a portion of the funds needed to make it happen. It's one of the prime reasons Kickstarters fail post-funding, actually, and if they don't fail, they create enormous amounts of stress and financial hardship for very little gain on the developer's part. They promise to improve their game in specific ways, only receive half the money needed to do so, and in the end of day it's impossible to tell how much those features affected sales and it's very possible they didn't at all. Sounds great!

A lot of game devs have preached about how you should avoid stretch goals altogether. Some say you should just make a vague promise of a better product with more money earned, and then figure out what you can do with it all after the fact. But having a small handful of stretch goals with very conservative prices are another option. That's basically what's happening here, and that's just fine. They don't owe you anything beyond what they promise in the basic feature set. With this KS specifically, you're paying for the OVA and whatever extra goods you want. Don't back if that's not enough for you.

Edit: There's also the fact that all aspects of game development, from creation, to yes, even translation, are far more expensive than you're imagining. You see kickstarters for entire full-featured indie games with $100k goals and wonder why a VN translation would need a similar goal. The trick: That full-featured game is actually being done on a desperate shoe-string budget for $500k and they're only asking for a fifth of the needed funds. In a way, this anime kickstarter is the same. Maybe making a 60 minute OVA costs $500,000, but they actually aren't getting $500k for actual anime production until they're making around $900k off the Kickstarter, most likely. 

You can easily say the solution to these problems is to price your Kickstarter goals at what they actually need, all fees and such accounted for, but then you'll end up with $500k-$1mil goals for small games and goals at many millions for much bigger games, and how likely are these projects to succeed? I'm reminded of how people bitched endlessly at how overpriced the Skullgirls crowdfunding projects were, even though they still probably weren't breaking even on those. 

tl;dr: Development is fucking expensive, and whatever you're imagining this stuff costs is almost certainly far lower than what the figures actually are. Having stretch goals that are actually appropriately priced isn't a bad thing.

Edited by Decay
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1 hour ago, WinterfuryZX said:

I avoid most of italian localizations of non english native games because they usually are simple retranslations from english, thats why I'm curious about this, this is the first time SP working with different languages.

Oh.  In that case, this is an important question to ask.  I'd ask Sekai Project directly, though.  There's like 30 days left in the Kickstarter, they might respond.

It must suck being a fan of games that natively speaks Italian.  I remember the days when English-translated video games were very hit or miss; it sucked bigtime.

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