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Sekai Project offering refunds for Narcissu kickstarter


tahu157

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For the last year or so the Narcissu team has been porting all of the games and side stories to Unity for what they believe will be the best possible version of the games. It's been taking forever though and a few weeks ago they held a poll for physical backers asking if we wanted to them to wait until the porting was finished to start producing the physical copies of the game, or just go ahead and ship out physical copies with the current, non-Unity version of the game. The poll came back with a pretty large majority voting to wait. However, they acknowledge that some people are probably sick of waiting at this point (it's been almost 4 years) and are offering refunds on the campaign through the month of April.

From the email:

Quote

From the previous private update we asked for Backers to decide on waiting or not to wait for the Unity builds before we make physical copies.

From that survey received 160 responses and the majority (77%) wish to wait. We will use the Unity port as the basis of the physical copy.

However we're also aware there's a minority of Backers who will be unhappy with this decision. If you wish to request a refund of the campaign we will accept them for the month of April. Please request a refund by emailing [email protected] and we will process them as fast as we can.

The email doesn't really say whether or not everyone that backed can opt for a refund, but I would guess that only physical backers can actually get one. They sent Steam keys out like a year and a half (or more?) ago so digital-only backers have already received what they paid for. Not sure if anyone here backed physically and is interested in a refund, but I thought I'd make the post in case anyone does want one and didn't catch the email.

Also, as far as I know this is the first time Sekai Project has voluntarily offered refunds for any of their campaigns. If I were to read into this move more deeply I'd probably say that this is Sekai Project indirectly admitting that they took on way too many projects way too fast.

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Seems to me like Sekai is trying to clear its bad reputation if we group together their recent actions.

(The re-translations attempts with Hoshimemo and ChronoClock, trying to keep with the monthly updates on some projects, offering refunds, translation status page opened, restructuring of the company team... I lost my faith on them, so I may be missing some stuff that I didn't check or see)

Let's just see if this keeps up and they turn in a better company or if they will just continue being... Bleh.  :amane:

Also if they are really trying be a better company, it makes me want to punch them for releasing a Chinese translation without even checking it first.

Edited by nekofuwafuwa
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I want so badly to like Sekai Project like I did in 2015, it's just hard to like them right now. I'm glad that  this year they're trying. I just hope they release more vns that they were supposed to release a long time ago, and of course their Kickstarters need to have less issues. I still want to read Clockwork Ley-Line trilogy and Hoshimemo. I do own a copy of Hoshimemo on Steam, but since it is getting retranslated I'll wait. Ill also work for Ley-Line trilogy to be completely released. In the meantime I have other vns to finish. I just hope they get better. For now I like Mangagamer and Nekonyan. I haven't read any vns distributed by Sol Press yet, but they may be my 3rd favorite. Anyway I didn't mean to go off topic. I'm glad they're offering a refund.

Edited by yelsha57
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8 hours ago, tahu157 said:

Also, as far as I know this is the first time Sekai Project has voluntarily offered refunds for any of their campaigns. If I were to read into this move more deeply I'd probably say that this is Sekai Project indirectly admitting that they took on way too many projects way too fast.

It's the second time.  The first time wasn't due to egregious delays (which has been a big problem for Sekai recently) but was rather because the company they partnered with turned out to be involved in some shady stuff.  "Ongoing legal issues and noncompliance" is really vague and could mean, well, anything.

But astroturfing paid review spam?  If Steam catches anyone involved, and it turns out Sekai project did anything that looks like they were complicit, Steam might cut off access not just to the dev and that one game.  Valve would likely cut off Sekai Project entirely (as in, ban them and delist their entire catalogue).  So the dev doing this posed, basically, an existential threat to Sekai as a whole, by way of tainting Sekai by association.  So I'm 100% behind Sekai in that one specific circumstance.  It was a giant clusterfuffle, but it's clearly someone else's fault.

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