Iro Posted March 21, 2015 Share Posted March 21, 2015 I don't really think that's MG's point. The percentage of people who import fan translated games (vs. play them) is probably much much lower than the percentage of people who buy English official releases. If we estimate that 10% of players buy the English official release for a given (non-fan translated) title, then maybe 0.1-1% import fan-translated titles. Then when an official release comes along for a fan-translated game like Ef that gets no mainstream attention, that 10% probably dips below 5%. There's a lot of people who don't import, are willing to buy official releases, yet don't see the point of buying a game they already played and don't intend to play again. And there's a lot of people inbetween I'm sure--who buy *some* of the games they play fan-translated, *most* of the games they play with official releases, and *very few* of the games that were fan-translated and later officially released. Mangagamer, and their Japanese partners, are observing market trends and trying to steer the market, in whatever small way they can, with their statements. If everyone bought every game they played, I doubt they'd ever see the need to make such a statement, and indeed I doubt Japanese VN companies would bother to C&D fan translations at all. I don't know about that. Have you yourself bought more mangagamer games than import Japanese ones? How does mangagamer even know how many people imported? Are they only comparing them only to the english translated titles they've sold? What about from other distributors like Jast? What about the people already fluent in Japanese or learning Japanese? Didn't the whole fan translation scene start from buying imported titles and translating them in the first place? Personally I've imported a few Japanese titles but bought 0 mangagamers titles. I like VNs with good stories but am turned off by boob heavy VN's like those from mangagamer. I doubt I'm alone in this and if you extrapolate my buying habits, there's prob more people who buy fan-translated/imported Jap releases than english releases especially from manga gamer. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Decay Posted March 21, 2015 Share Posted March 21, 2015 Extrapolating data from a sample size of 1 is a very poor idea. Anyways, yes, personally I have bought more mangagamer games than Japanese games. And I suspect this is the norm. Very few people talk about importing, but I see people talk about buying licensed VNs pretty frequently. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Iro Posted March 21, 2015 Share Posted March 21, 2015 What kind of games did you buy then Decay? If you like hentai titles then that's understandable. But the vast majority of story VNs are fan translated, not done by english distributors, much less mangagamer. Its not just extrapolating from a sample of one either, just look at vndb, the most popular VNs are story heavy and not hentai titles (nukige?). For example going by the most popular list on vndb, if I wanted to buy Fate/Stay Night, G-senjou no Maou, Saya no Uta, Ever17 or Sharin no Kun. I can't buy it from mangagamer. The next 5 on the list, can't buy from mangagamer. Same thing for the next 5, or the 5 after that. Mangagamer is irrelevant to my and going by this list many other's preference in VNs. Nothing comes in from mangagamer til #26 Kirakira. Now Kirakira I've actually tried bc of good reviews on the net but urgg hated it. Too boring, too much cutsy idol stuff. Deleted before finish. #27 is Kara no Shoujo, I assume this is what sanahtlig means when he says MG's best title. This actually looks interesting and something I might enjoy... maybe. But I would not of known about this if sanahtlig had not mentioned it. Oh by the way this is prob the reason why sanahtlig say Kara no Shoujo had poor sales too. If its so good then Mangagamer should of been putting it on the frontpage, screaming how good it is. I've been to mangagamer's site before and I had no idea mangagamer even had non-hentai/moe titles. Instead the site is just boobs everywhere. In real life people don't go to a sleezy adult book shop to buy a complex murder mystery, and people who buy complex murder mysteries will get turned off by adult book shops you know? Anyways back to the point, vndb has currently 16427 entries of vn's, all of mangagamer's titles combined are not even close to 1% of that, of those most of them are simple hentai titles that aren't very popular. There's tons of untranslated titles that people want that MG isn't even interested in doing. MG frankly has no business telling fansubbers what to do with their spare time. If they wanna complain about poor sales, they should really have a look at how they market non-hentai titles before blaming fansubbing. (I also see credits for TLWiki on the Kara no Shoujo page, did MG even translate this?) What this medium needs is more fansubbers working on fun titles, not less. You can see from other stuff like anime and manga. Its pretty popular around world now mostly due to the work of many generations of dedicated fansubbers. You can even find anime and manga titles on amazon or new york times best seller lists. Meanwhile VNs is the least unpopular of the 3, due to most of it is still in inaccessible Japanese and the bad rep of been associated with pornographic content. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zakamutt Posted March 21, 2015 Share Posted March 21, 2015 I think few people go to the trouble of importing from Fapan rather than buying localized stuff, assuming they actually buy. However I am merely extrapolating from myself, as I have never imported a title but have indeed spent money on VNs. See what I did there? And yeah marketing for VNs ain't easy it seems. Part of this is Kouryuu's MG philosophy of catering to everyone, which is fine but a separation of titles into nukige and non-nukige might be nice lol. That said, given how low brand awareness is for VN companies in general (perhaps bar sekai project at this point), the people who are actually informed enough to know might be expected to know of MG's non-nukige releases. I can't speak on the subject myself since I'm way too much of a nerd and know most if not all of the loc companies' recent story vn efforts... Deleted before finish. oh lord Kira Kira is somewhat interesting as the character routes generally go for a real drama shift abandoning all that silly music stuff. The real good point is arguably Kirari's route(s) with Chie's being decent enough. That said, if you get bored of the first half then meh, I'm not going to tell people to power through it. I personally enjoyed it myself, so... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Decay Posted March 21, 2015 Share Posted March 21, 2015 What kind of games did you buy then Decay? If you like hentai titles then that's understandable. But the vast majority of story VNs are fan translated, not done by english distributors, much less mangagamer. Its not just extrapolating from a sample of one either, just look at vndb, the most popular VNs are story heavy and not hentai titles (nukige?). For example going by the most popular list on vndb, if I wanted to buy Fate/Stay Night, G-senjou no Maou, Saya no Uta, Ever17 or Sharin no Kun. I can't buy it from mangagamer. The next 5 on the list, can't buy from mangagamer. Same thing for the next 5, or the 5 after that. Mangagamer is irrelevant to my and going by this list many other's preference in VNs. Nothing comes in from mangagamer til #26 Kirakira. Now Kirakira I've actually tried bc of good reviews on the net but urgg hated it. Too boring, too much cutsy idol stuff. Deleted before finish. #27 is Kara no Shoujo, I assume this is what sanahtlig means when he says MG's best title. This actually looks interesting and something I might enjoy... maybe. But I would not of known about this if sanahtlig had not mentioned it. Oh by the way this is prob the reason why sanahtlig say Kara no Shoujo had poor sales too. If its so good then Mangagamer should of been putting it on the frontpage, screaming how good it is. I've been to mangagamer's site before and I had no idea mangagamer even had non-hentai/moe titles. Instead the site is just boobs everywhere. In real life people don't go to a sleezy adult book shop to buy a complex murder mystery, and people who buy complex murder mysteries will get turned off by adult book shops you know? Anyways back to the point, vndb has currently 16427 entries of vn's, all of mangagamer's titles combined are not even close to 1% of that, of those most of them are simple hentai titles that aren't very popular. There's tons of untranslated titles that people want that MG isn't even interested in doing. MG frankly has no business telling fansubbers what to do with their spare time. If they wanna complain about poor sales, they should really have a look at how they market non-hentai titles before blaming fansubbing. (I also see credits for TLWiki on the Kara no Shoujo page, did MG even translate this?) What this medium needs is more fansubbers working on fun titles, not less. You can see from other stuff like anime and manga. Its pretty popular around world now mostly due to the work of many generations of dedicated fansubbers. You can even find anime and manga titles on amazon or new york times best seller lists. Meanwhile VNs is the least unpopular of the 3, due to most of it is still in inaccessible Japanese and the bad rep of been associated with pornographic content. I play story based games almost exclusively. Why are you assuming that people who play fan-translated games import them? I think it is really safe to assume that a much larger percentage of people pirate fan-translated VNs than officially translated ones. A MUCH larger percentage. I'd put a lot of money on that bet. Suzu Fanatic 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Clephas Posted March 22, 2015 Share Posted March 22, 2015 Almost all of the best story-focused VNs have H-content, Iro. The ones that don't are in the vast minority, since the medium as a whole is more than 90% based on PC. Mangagamer doesn't have the capacity or the necessary talent to handle something on the scale of Bradyon Veda or Dies Irae, so of course they are disproportionately skewed towards moege and nukige. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Crayten Posted March 23, 2015 Share Posted March 23, 2015 Almost all of the best story-focused VNs have H-content, Iro. The ones that don't are in the vast minority, since the medium as a whole is more than 90% based on PC. Mangagamer doesn't have the capacity or the necessary talent to handle something on the scale of Bradyon Veda or Dies Irae, so of course they are disproportionately skewed towards moege and nukige. I would kill (or pay shitloads of money) for a good english official Release of these 2 VNs but i guess thats not gonna happen soon. (Someone pls Fan Translate it! ) Suzu Fanatic 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Suzu Fanatic Posted March 23, 2015 Share Posted March 23, 2015 I play story based games almost exclusively. Why are you assuming that people who play fan-translated games import them? I think it is really safe to assume that a much larger percentage of people pirate fan-translated VNs than officially translated ones. A MUCH larger percentage. I'd put a lot of money on that bet. I can't speak for others, but I only see titles that MG will likely "never" touch anyway getting fan TLs (which in part is probably why they get TL'd unofficially). It's all about accessibility - if a product is easy to get through a legit source, I will happily pay for it - but if I have to choose between import/export hell (or outright impossible to get a hold of), versus a torrent...well, no one gave me a third option~ Some faulty reasoning in there, I know, but still~ MG blaming fan TLs for their bad sales/xenophobic devs is just lol, because the type of VNs they localize versus the type that are fan Tl'd are often worlds apart. Well...actually, I can see a connection afterall, a lot (not all) of MGs games are pretty terrible - when a group fan TL's something like Fate/Stay Night, suddenly the community realizes just how terrible a lot of MGs titles are - and at that point, who wants to spend money on cheap fap material, besides a portion of Steam users? (zing!) But that's just my feeling on the matter - and it's probably an ignorant opinion based on just my reasoning. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maou Posted March 23, 2015 Share Posted March 23, 2015 Yeah right, they will never license certain type of "fan translated" games, even if someone sends then the translated scripts beforehand. Fan translators deserves respect, the VN scene would not be the same without these gentlemen! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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