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Why is Sekai taking forever to release new VNs?


Happiness+

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I was just going through their past releases on their Wikipedia and you guys know better than me, that 2015 and 2016 were their best years as far as releases. Then things slowed down in 2017 and all of 2018 they released just two VNs. What the hell is going on here? Did they loose a bunch of workers after 2016 and now it’s only five people in that whole company. 

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Not sure but some guesses would be.

1. Due to the amount of projects and the quick growth of the company the people responsible for management are unable to handle all the projects leading to poor communication with the freelancers who work on the titles. This would explain the problems they have had with some of their larger titles the last few years.

2. The amount of new companies have made it harder to get professional quality translators since so many are already working on titles for other companies.

3. Sekai Project pretty much have no idea what they are doing. One instance that baffles me for instance is that they made physical copies for short titles with no hype behind them rather than making physicals for longer more popular titles. Considering shipping prices and production prices it just seems really stupid to aim for physicals for short titles unless they sell really well.

Edited by bakauchuujin
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1 minute ago, bakauchuujin said:

One instance that baffles me for instance is that they made physical copies for short titles with no hype behind them rather than making physicals for longer more popular titles.

1. Short title sells more copies

2. There is physicals for Clannad, Grisaia, Hoshimemo, Chrono Clock, ???

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7 minutes ago, Kiriririri said:

1. Short title sells more copies

2. There is physicals for Clannad, Grisaia, Hoshimemo, Chrono Clock, ???

Short titles generally works best because they are cheap, adding the production cost and shipping makes them cost a lot compared to how much people think the VN is worth. If a VN cost $15 digitally and goes on sale for $10 from time to time, paying $25 or $30 for a physical seems a bit much. With a larger title the extra costs are not as much compared to the original price and what you get for the copy.

As for the larger ones they have used kickstarter, I failed to say the physicals they did without kickstarters, should have been clearer my bad. The ones I am refering to are Hard Work and Love's Sweet Garnish, both short titles that pretty much lacked any real hype and neither seems to have a lot of votes on vndb. Instead they could have made physicals for something like Koikuma or Wagamama high spec.

Edited by bakauchuujin
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They've certainly run into problems over the years that have kept them from releasing titles in a timely manner, but more recently they laid off several employees (non-translation staff) and went through a restructuring that delayed things further. Apparently they're aiming for Q1 releases of Nanairo Reincarnation and Majo Koi Nikki so we'll see if they can keep to that schedule. They released several smaller VNs in 2018 but larger titles are definitely their bottleneck. This year will probably be a proving ground for whether or not they can rebound from all of their issues. If 2019 is another weak year for them—or even worse, they have any more big fuckups—then I'd be worried about their continued existence.

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I guess the "only two releases in 2018" thing came from looking at their Wikipedia article? It's not even remotely accurate, fwiw. I'm seeing more than 20 actual new releases in 2018 according to VNDB: https://vndb.org/p162. Plus, there's at least one release which doesn't appear there and only appears on their Denpasoft VNDB page (I Walk Among Zombies); probably more, but I just happen to have been involved with Zombies: https://vndb.org/p162

Still, I agree they didn't have a ton of big-name releases in 2018, but then again, who did? For me, Ditzy Demons, Re;lord, and I Walk Among Zombies were all solid releases, though I am, again, obviously biased on that last one. I also keep meaning to play Fatal Twelve, since I hear good things. And of course some people cared a lot about Maitetsu in theory, though said people probably also complained bitterly when they got it.

All that said, they do still seem to have a pretty substantial backlog that I guess they're working through.

Edited by Fred the Barber
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MaitetsuI Walk Among Zombies Vol. 1The Ditzy Demons Are In Love With MeRe;Lord 1 The witch of Hertfort and stuffed animalsFatal TwelveMhakna Gramura and Fairy BellA Light in the DarkNeko Para ExtraNeko-nin exHeart 2Shining Song StarnovaLove's Sweet GarnishLynneAIdolGirls in GlassesCyberRebeatLast StanzaHard WorkCreature Romances and Innocent Forest: The Bird of Light are titles published by SP last year. While this looks like a lot, most of them were either short titles (not that much to translate) or english original titles that were just published under SP (they probably weren't really involved in those but just put their name on it and got some profit for using their name). The only ones I can see that are medium length or longer and not originally english are MaitetsuFatal Twelve and The Ditzy Demons Are In Love With Me.

 

The Ditzy Demons Are In Love With Me actually got a release date early 2018, but it got pushed back to the end of the year, from what I seem to remember it was because it still lacked the Chinese translation and Sayori wanted to release it with all the language options. This would mean that they kind of screwed up by giving it a release date before really checking if it actually could be released within that time. 

Then there is Maitetsu which was a huge blunder with the censorship issues.

Fatal Twelve I haven't really heard that much about so I guess they probably did a decent job with it.

Edited by bakauchuujin
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According to VNDB, they release number could rivaling Mangagamer so if we look at it objectively then I must defend Sekai's honor here lol. As for 2018 release, they did have Fatal Twelve, Maitetsu, and Bokukotsu as the big releases (Also there's some episodic release such as ReLord and Zombie VN). That sad, other than those most of their other releases were only small releases so I understand when people say that there's no big release from Sekai, when in fact their big releases were overshadowed by the releases from Mangagmer and Nekonyan. Not to mention that they still didn't release Daybreak yet along with freeze some of their big Yuzusoft title, and don't forget that they lost one of their license. Let's just hope that they'll manage to release more big title in the future, especially Daybreak because it's one of my personal interest.

PS - The censorship mess from Maitetsu was Lose's fault by the way, although there's already a patch to get around the mess though. If anything at least it's not as bad as Pulltop's censorship because we can still see the sex scenes fr the 18+ version.

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1 hour ago, littleshogun said:

PS - The censorship mess from Maitetsu was Lose's fault by the way, although there's already a patch to get around the mess though. If anything at least it's not as bad as Pulltop's censorship because we can still see the sex scenes fr the 18+ version.

Still doesn't justify them not managing to figure out that such clear censorship was censorship. SP didn't check the VN they worked on enough to figure out obvious censorship and as such never mentioned it and claimed to Fakku that it was completely uncensored. While Lose is behind the decision the way SP handled it is just horrible and they deserve the backlash for it. The problem is not SP censoring content, but rather the complete lack of effort put into making sure that their VNs are released the way the consumer wants and not communicating about the problems with their release, making people figure it out after they have bought it.

Edited by bakauchuujin
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52 minutes ago, Happiness+ said:

Why censor the content at all?

Didn’t Steam loosen whatever regulations they had an Visual Novels? 

 

Maitetsu, for one, is a loli game through and through, so it wouldn't pass on Steam in uncensored version even with the new rules. Plus, there are still benefits from releasing an all-ages version, as the game will be still visible to people that have 18+ games filtered out, and you can usually add the 18+ content as an optional DLC. Sekai especially has a policy of releasing the all-ages versions cheap, boosting sales on that, and asking a steep premium for the h-scenes. Quite a shrewd tactic IMHO, even if pretty scummy, as in general cheap VNs sell way better on Steam.

Edited by Plk_Lesiak
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4 hours ago, Happiness+ said:

Didn’t Steam loosen whatever regulations they had an Visual Novels?

At the time of the release they hadn't yet loosened up, IIRC, though I could be wrong about the timing... At any rate, worth mentioning that Steam has since apparently tightened up way further than things ever were before, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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