novurdim

you should probably just name yourself "Himawariel" already so people would always know what to expect from your posts

Now that sure took long for a game as popular as Grisaia with a goal at mere 80k.

Ah, right, it is also being brought over literally right now, they encountered several technical problems.

Which is completely useless simply because a) almost all western localizations don't have dates until the last month and GameFaq doesn't count them b) GF list is literally empty, it doesn't even have any indies, obviously noone updates it It's quite clear you have no idea what games are localized and/or are actually good enough to be brought over, I don't understand why would you get into this debate. But we can discuss it of course, if you want, and I'm sorry everyone that this turned into the vita off-topic. Firstly, let's look at the confirmed 2017 vita localizations that are not accounted for in your attempt to show the list. Some of those even have dates so GF is, again, simply not updated by anyone: I probably missed a few, I don't count extremely late ports like Rabi-Ribi, Fault, WEE, Root Double etc and I don't even count KS games like Sharin and Dies Irae to be completely fair. Not to mention that this list is mostly for the first half of the year, fall/winter localizations are usually announced in april/may, and among those we already know a few that are as good as confirmed like Chaos;Child, Yu-No, Punchline and Blue Reflection. Next let's talk japanese exclusives. Among the unlocalized exclusive vita games the only relatively decent enough games I would like to see brought over are Tales of Innocence R, Phantasy Star Nova, Net High, Yuusha Shisu, Demon Gaze II, Luminous Arc Infinity, Uppers, SaGa: Scarlet Grace, Coven and Labyrinth of Refrain, The Princess is Money-Hungry, Idol Death Game TV, Dungeon Travelers 2-2 and Death Mark. Among those only PS Nova and ToI R don't have absolutely any chance to be localized, and chances for LA Infinity are slim. Net High/Uppers are rumored to be brought over by PQube, Yuusha/Coven/Princess are NIS games which always have good chances to be translated, DG II/Death Mark are Exp. projects most of which end up localized, SaGa has been heavily hinted by SE recently, IDG TV are on the table for XSEED as they themselves mentioned and DT 2-2 is likely to be picked up by Atlus as they were the ones to localize the DT 2. What are those mythical exclusive japanese masterpieces you talk about I have no idea, Vita library in Japan is nowhere near PSP in terms of good exclusive games. You won't even find that many great multiplatform unlocalized games, even though I'm forever sad that noone translated Time Travellers.

Well, to each his own. Nier's logic obviously stems from the single idea: japanese unlocalized exclusive => good vita game; localized but now multiplatform same game => bad or non-existant vita game. If you don't play on vita or plan to, that's probably how the situation would indeed look to most.

We only discuss it in regards to japanese localizations and smaller games which are an actual theme of a forum like fuwanovel's. If you want to look at the big picture, then, as I said from the very beginning, tis indeed won't ever reach another million-seller and can be considered RIPed to the more mainstream audience and Sony from around the 2014. I only ever played jap games on my PSP so I'm not exactly bothered, to be honest.

It's not like you can't have an opinion but I don't believe many people who actually have and play on vita would agree with you. Not to mention that most good games are localized nowadays so "support outside Japan" is completely dependent on Japan itself and isn't bad at all yet. Literally every jap-to-eng publisher still releases vita titles in the West, not only NISA. As for exclusives, well, let's digress from vita and look at the super successful PS4. What do we see? We see that despite PS4 being the epitome of success, almost every exclusive game from the localization companies (hell, almost every game not from Sony itself) is becoming multiplatform during the localization. You can see examples from any companies: Oneechanbara, EDF, every new IFI game, every new NISA game, most Square Enix/Bamco/Tecmo games etc. They are all getting pc ports and I doubt it's because PS4 is such an unviable platform. It's just that the age of exclusives is long gone, japanese games are not "sony's thing" anymore like they've been during PS2/PS3. One of the very few exceptions from this new rule is Atlus (and by extension SEGA) and they are actually localizing a vita exclusive in the 2017 (Caligula). So it's not so much that they are turning their back on localizing vita exclusives as the companies are following the times and porting their games on as many platforms as possible to maximize the profits. Hence just as I feel that games like KBO, Net High (yes, I know XSEED won't do it), Uppers, SaGa have high chances to be translated, the chances are just as high for a PC-port down the line, it's not a bad thing and not exactly vita's fault. The fact that XSEED only localized vita/PS4 multiplats lately is barely a substantial proof too, you can look at this relatively recent comment from the XSEED official (around half a year ago), for example. So, most of the things said about vita are a simple case of hysteria and absense of any care or marketing from Sony (they sometimes even go as far as not mentioning that vita version is localized at all to drag down its sales when compared to PS4, I'm not completely sure why they even feel the need to do so). As vita's niche is comparably small, it's not surprising that most people, who only superficially look at the situation, will make a conclusion that vita is long done and it's safe to put every sin of failure on it. In truth, it's hanging on very decently for its niche and we'll likely say that it has done well and can rest now only in 2019 when there will only be at best one game in 2-3 months by the most enthusiastic. By then Vita will be seven years old, not such a bad run for a failure. But we probably should stop discussing vita in a topic about 428. Vita is not exactly a popularity powerhouse so the fact that SC are not making a western exclusive vita-version for their first and rather risky localization shouldn't be all that shocking. It's rather amazing they are doing this thing at all.

It's happening for, erm, at least three years already, I believe. It started around the time Killzone Mercenary came out and still pretty much untrue, but we live in the age of hatred so everyone outside the actual vita fanbase gets a kick out of bashing it, which is nothing new. It is indeed long "dead" in regards of big mainstream AAA titles but that doesn't have anything to do with us perverts who play weird weeaboo games. And... I'm not quite sure why we are talking about KB Otome here? Japanese publishers usually go with someone like Aksys for that kind of games to print physical copies and have a decent marketing but Aksys are a bit busy with lots of other vita otomes atm. Plus it's pretty much the first try for Spike Chunsoft to publish something completely on their own in the west, it's understandable why they wouldn't use something like KBO for their debut.

Wasn't CB literally their worst seller though?

To be honest, from the KS I don't really get how and when they are going to release it. They... wouldn't wait for the whole trilogy to be finished, would they?

Sorry for necroing a somewhat older post but the guys from PQube have finally commented on this in their recent interview. "So is the Vita dead? Not for us, not now – I’d say it’s on the decline, but we still have Vita titles through the next year. Valkyrie Drive was our last Vita-only title, so you could only play that on Vita and that’s done extremely well for us. Visual novel content has done well – Root Letter and the original Steins;Gate has done phenomenally well. The sales on Vita have vastly outstripped the sales on PS4 with something like Root Letter. Steins;Gate was pretty much all on Vita too, then a small amount on PS3.” Is this something to do with format, perhaps? We don’t tend to talk of genres in terms of platforms specifically, but maybe with something like a visual novel we should. It seems immediately a good fit of software and hardware. Evans calls Vita “by far my most played console, hands down. I play more on Vita than anything else." Source: http://www.kotaku.co.uk/2017/02/10/britsoft-focus-pqube So, yeah, VNs on vita do sell.

Well, since noone posted it yet, here you go. This retailer is apparently highly trusted, leaked quite a few announcements before, so we probably can take its listings as a 99% guarantee. >Chaos;Child (PS4, PS Vita) >Punch Line (PS4, PS Vita) >YU-NO: A Girl Who Chants Love at the Bound of this World (PS4, PS Vita) Source Not sure just how vn-ish Punchline is (probably another ADV hybrid) and CC is no surprise by now but I certainly never expected an official YU-NO remake localization. All games look like PQUBE material so they sure keep doing great work with VNs, now we just wait for an official confirmation, it should come soon enough. Still hoping for Net High though.

Let's not, I clearly said what charts I looked into so I avoided this problem from the very beginning, you are pulling the wrong string here or taking me for an idiot. They give good comparison to other niche titles but no hard numbers hence why it's an assumption. But I can still say it looked very far from a hit when compared even to other niche games like Gal Gun. And I wish you really read what I say but we rarely get what we want. It's only important because I had a lot of chances to compare official numbers released by the publishers over the years while you clearly didn't. It's pretty much the only reason you are so stubborn about the physical:digital ratio, people have long calculated these things from the available albeit limited sources, just because you can't completely rely on famitsu, doesn't mean you can write everything off and pretend that games sell better digitally with zero basis. But obviously the whole point of my initial post is a somewhat silly far-fetched estimation as we will never get anything better, noone ever tried to present it as facts and it successfully accomplished its mission to derail the console wars. And even being extremely far-fetched, it's still better than your alternative of believing we know completely nothing just because there're no official numbers for every region. The popularity of this range always shows in the west, just like we can safely assume it didn't sell 100k digitally in Japan. That is all but that is still enough to be baffled by the number. So yes, it's a more a matter of how stubborn you are, if you don't believe anything but official numbers anyway them I'm not sure why we are having this conversation because my post was never meant to satisfy you. I'm more tired than anything now, to be honest, there is really no point to keep wasting our time like this. If they ever release am official number, I'll come back to compare how accurate or inaccurate my educated assumptions were. Funny you mentioned that, now the popularity of 999 in the west was never a surprise, we wouldn't have this conversation if RL was the same and that would easily show lol

The fact that Japanese don't buy nearly as many games digitally is no assumption though, it has enough ground to say that your guess about it selling times better on psn is basically impossible. Assumption is when I say I don't believe in huge sales in the west because I have never seen it on decent places in any charts ever (and I do follow them closely) and I know that even 20k seller is a pretty great hit that would have been widely heard for this kind of game. Hell, if a game could sell even 10k digitally on vita and never appear in a single best-selling list that you can always see on psn or psblog then vita would still be flourishing. Same with other places. When the PS4-version also rates about the same as the vita one and both combined easily lose to a Bhikkuni (vita-exclusive), you can guess with a 100% accuracy that the game is no danganronpa or SG. And when Japanese and West can't possibly reach even 100k together, you obviously only have asian territories to count on. Actually, the game was on the PS+ for Asia. Maybe Kadokawa went insane and counted some of those downloads towards the milestone, who knows, by now it's a mistery like no other how it got to 200k. Gal Gun was constantly ranking higher everywhere in Japan and West, got Steam release and then even appeared on the first place of the steam current top sellers for a while and Gal Gun still only sold 100k worldwide, which they recently announced. The only upper hand Root Letter even theoretically could have over GG is the extremely successful release in asian territories. My reasoning is based on the objective observation and accumulated experience. Overall it's obviously no fact, but you still can't provide an alternative or a straight counter-argument so there's not much point to this, whether you believe me or not, especially since you yourself have not much knowledge or interest in the field of console sales.

Well, I can only add this random analysis I just found, even if it's pretty weak and mostly about music. It seriously is a common knowledge that Japanese prefer physical and not only in games. Or that article about Japanese gaming overall. You can even google something like "do Japanese prefer physical games" and find a lot of relevant info and opinions. Simply because we don't have solid numbers for the title doesn't mean we should just believe that it defies the established logic. I stand by my opinion that it couldn't ever sell more than around 30-40k in Japan, and most likely the real number is even considerably lower. We have no reason to think otherwise, if you don't count the maniacal desire to doubt everything. http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-01-07-japans-console-and-handheld-physical-game-sales-at-lowest-point-for-24-years https://chikorita157.com/2016/01/19/physical-vs-digital-releases/

That's more than enough to draw the lines with what we hear every day from the publishers, the gap is too big to call it a sample error or research failure. Plus I doubt it's so simple since the ratio isn't exactly the same within a system. Honestly, I've never even seen an article, opinion, newsflash, press release or any other indication about Japan being big on digital, never expected to get into this kind of an argument, everyone just... assumes the physical superiority in Japan by now like the most natural thing ever. Sure, they buy more on psn now than years ago but to pretend like it's possible for a console vn like Root Letter to suddenly sell several times more digitally than physically for no reason is a super unholy assumption if I have ever seen one. I also don't agree that preferring physical is a sign of falling behind in technology but that's not important here, I suppose.

Famitsu is big enough (actually, the very biggest in Japan) to get their numbers directly from the publishers if they provide them at all, and some are pretty open about them, especially cases like Marvellous, Idea Factory and Bandai Namco. Yes, their reviews are horrible and mostly remind small paid ads but otherwise you simple have no other choice but to read it since they are usually the main and often the only source of all console news and announcements. They wouldn't fail THAT bad every month. If a game sells a third of its physical number, any game, the digital sales are considered very good. I talked about my years of experience and you surely wouldn't believe me but when japanese companies release numbers for the japanese sales, you can always see just how small digital portion is. Even for biggest vita games like SAO or Freedom Wars or God Eater or any other. They are the most casual things you can ever imagine, but their digital sales still usually but a tenth of an actual number. Things get iffy only when worldwide sales are concerned, like here. Of course, sometimes digital numbers are higher for a week, but only when there's a serious shortage on the physical copies and never overall. That's exactly the point, I have literally no idea about Eroge market, I only use console logic here.

To be honest, I'm apalled there's a person who still doubts a common knowledge like this, completely shocked, guess I'll have to dig old interviews soon. I obviously have no idea how Famitsu works but you do understand what Famitsu is and how they wouldn't really rely on guesswork, right? When you look at just how huge the gap usually is (for very casual games, mind you), I'm kinda surprised you can still argue with a straight face. http://www.perfectly-nintendo.com/japan-famitsu-sales-april-2016-top-30-retail-digital/

It doesn't indicate Japan, everybody knows that digital distribution is incomparably bigger in the West. Especially for vita, where it's often hard to even find a physical copy to buy when you want to but don't really enjoy ordering from other contries lol Estimates, of course, but they aren't just randomly fantasizing them like VGChartz, as you can imagine. Ignoring them when you have no other sources is a fallacy used to hide the fact that you will never find a single console VN with higher digital sales in Japan.

No, they weren't. Two years ago Japan was even bigger on physical than now. Also completely untrue. Famitsu releases digital sales annually and they are never even near the physical, especially for VNs. I'm not sure what you expect from the japanese, but "casual audiences" in that sense don't buy VNs even there. It's the best you can ever get on the topic when we have such limited sources. I also have years of experience and pretty closely follow console game sales in Japan and West, most of the assumptions are fairly obvious things you catch onto with time so I'm completely sure it didn't suddenly sell 100k in Japan and West just because.

We have quite a few candidates on these two pages already. I understand you're mimicking the guy but we are getting seriously off-topic here. Vita is surely nice, ps4 is nice too, let's move along already, I get enough silly console wars in literally any other place available. So, to remind why I've said about it probably being huge in the asian territories (i.e. not Japan), let's remember how it sold in Japan. [PSV+PS4] Root Letter (Kadokawa Games, 06/16/16) – 8 907 Yes, those are only the physical numbers for the first week but it never charted again and I am yet to see a single VN with digital numbers even around half of the physical ones so we can be more than sure that it's highly unlikely they sold more than 25-30k copies by now and I'm being extremely generous, thinking that it could have been in huge sales. But at the same time we've seen this piece of news: http://www.ricedigital.co.uk/kadokawa-name-pqube-root-letter-english-publisher/ "More than 50k preorders and Japan and other Asia regions". Considering how it sold in Japan, they are either straight-up lying or the vast majority of the pre-orders are from those "other asian territories" which is a, well, humongous number for a vn. Root Letter has never been among the psn top-sellers for neither ps4 nor vita, it wasn't even nearly a top-seller for the PQube's Rice Digital website (Bhikkuni, SG0 and Gal Gun easily destroyed it) and charted around the same so-so for both platforms on Amazon. Simply put, it's no danganronpa that has often been on top and always in spotlight but still managed to move 200k in the west only with both games combined (the numbers were released before the AE announcement). The grounds here are shaky, but I believe we can safely assume that there's no way it sold more in the West than in Japan and probably even 10-15k by now would be an overstatement. And so we get theoretically optimistical 35-45k for the West+Japan. Did China, Korea etc seriously buy at the very least 150k copies of this pretty but void game? It sounds far-fetched but actually almost plausible if we believe their statement about pre-orders. Maybe Mina Taro's art and the theme are weirdly resonating with chinese, I don't know.

Well, he said "refuse to think it's dead" so, duh, it's not.

I really don't think he meant it as something bad lol

Pretty sure it's that one genre which sells comparably well, if not at times better, on vita than on ps4. Though the only concrete numbers we have are that of SG on vita vastly outselling the ps3-version.

Either it has been impossibly huge in the Asian territories (like 150-160k, by all signs it couldn't have made more than 40-50k in Japan+West) or their numbers are very weirdly counted.