Nandemonai

If enough people are demanding their money back that the whole project is in peril of getting cancelled, they don't have a choice. I, along with all the other people who haven't demanded our money back, will angrily demand that they deliver what was promised. I don't want a refund. I want my game. And, you know, there's more of us than there are people asking for refunds (even if there have been a lot of requests for refunds). When they Kickstarted this project, they took upon themselves an obligation to deliver. Giving refunds to people who ask is not actually something Kickstarter obligates them to do. So if they have to pick, one or the other, well, that's not a hard decision. Their reputation is equally in peril if they cancel the game because a minority of folks have buyer's remorse.

Don't presume to speak for "the target audience". That's hubris enforced by the echo chamber you live in. Most people do not engage online communities. Only the biggest diehard fans do. A small subset, skewed heavily towards those with strong opinions, is not a representative sample. And your opinion is not even universally shared among the online community.

Shady fundraiser? What would be shady about it?

Nah, they're ... okay, they're not "fine". But this has happened at least once before, when their Steam key policy backfired and caused a raft of fraud that forced them to get cut off by their then-current payment processor. MangaGamer still has games on Steam making them money, and they are run by a group of Japanese VN companies anyway. Sure, the games on Steam probably aren't making them that much money, but that's always been true and they've been around for 10 years now.

Seems like you double-linked the same blog post, @Clephas.

Sorry, but you can't no-true-Scotsman your way around the fact that in the very early days there were no fan patches at all. Back in 1996 Jast USA released Season of the Sakura. In 1999 Otaku Publishing released True Love. The first really successful fan patch (that I know of) was Tsukihime, and that didn't release until like 2004. By the time fan patches were a thing, G-Collections had come and gone already. They released a game a month for about 2 years before they imploded. Between that, C's Ware, Jast USA / Peach Princess's output, and the half a dozen other companies (or so) that released one or two games then folded (including Megatech, the first company to translate an h-game - in 1992!) ... Fan patches have always been outnumbered by official releases. Sure, most of the games released in those early days weren't all that great (and the translations weren't either). But they were there. In 2010, there were loads of legitimate releases to choose from (including Demonbane). You can't ignore the giant pile of releases, then say "see, there isn't anything here"

That can't be right. It's got to be more than 5 illegal downloads for each purchase. He must have been being overly conservative. Edit to add: The claim of selling about a thousand units or so seems pretty on the money to me. I'll put it this way: Nekopara was successful enough to propel Sekai into a major publisher and keep them there. If all games sold like Nekopara, we'd see a lot more English releases by more publishers. Another fun fact: If you take the average Kickstarter take, and divide by $40, except for the extreme outliers, you get a number that's the equivalent of between 1K and 2K copies sold.

Except that the main character is a girl, and there seem to be "heroines". I considered looking at the CG, but I have an allergic reaction to [edit: NC material]. VNDB did list lots of straight (rape) action in the tags though. So I dunno. The only one that seems remotely in line with that hint is this game. Even if it doesn't fit very well. Either that or they're going to announce it at that November con (or maybe next year; perhaps, say, a complication came up in the licensing).

So they did. And now that I look at the status tracker again, the yuri title is probably https://vndb.org/r64810. I haven't even really thought about that one since it doesn't appeal to me at all.

They sort of have now, actually: mangagamer.org/announcements now says this: Update: Thank you to everyone who attended our Otakon panel! We'll be at Anime NYC next, so stay tuned for more information. Curiously enough, unlike at AX, they didn't indicate which secret projects the 3 were. So even though there were 3 Otakon announcements and 3 secret projects, we don't know all the announcements were secret projects. Maybe none of them were and Anime NYC will be full of announcements! (Probably not. Their announcements page has 12 already and they release 1 game a month.)

Well, that's very interesting, actually; I don't think any of the Otakon announcements really satisfies the yuri hint, do they?

It's a complex series of tradeoffs. MangaGamer definitely cannot release stuff on other companies' stores while theirs isn't working, then yank them once things are back up and running. Not unless they want to burn all the bridges. So if they put their games on another storefront, that's a long term relationship. Which, yes, brings extra business but also its own set of drawbacks. MangaGamer also does not want to help another company become the de facto Sexy Steam (the place everyone goes to buy games and you're screwed if your game isn't there). Why are Steam's spastic fits and inability to act as a gatekeeper to their own store such a big deal? Because Steam has a hold on a vast audience that will only deal with you Steam's way, or the highway. Steam has power, when they throw their weight around, the earth moves. So in addition to having to pay someone else the platform tax, and giving that platform a gift of raising that platform's visibility by their games' presence on it - MangaGamer runs the risk of helping to create a situation where yet another company has effective control over the distribution destiny of their games. That position (being The Hentai Store)? That's exactly what Nutaku and Fakku want. It's no surprise the established VN companies are reluctant to go whole hog on lending their libraries to them. They don't want to be beholden to someone else the way they're beholden to Steam. If anything, they themselves want to be in that position.

This is par for the course. The last time they had to get a new payment processor it took something like 2 months. First they have to talk to a bunch of different payment processor companies to try and find one they want to work with. Then they have to have their web developers (who are all contractors, that's why they don't do things to their site all that often, it's a royal pain for them to do it) integrate with this new system. Each of these can easily take a few weeks. Minimum.

Exactly. "They used to have them" is perfectly consistent with what we've been told (which is that they didn't have stuff backed up as well as they thought they did). Given the way things like this work, it's always possible someone finds an old computer tucked away in a closet somewhere that has the files. Much old TV that was once thought lost forever has been rediscovered that way. But odds aren't good.

You did, when you said 'etc etc'. MangaGamer is one of those other companies. Your point also can't reasonably be addressed without pointing out the fact that issues like this are common. The point that I'm making is that you can't just gloss over MangaGamer. It's directly on point. I'm explicitly comparing Sol Press' gymnastics (with the clean-site-and-patch-elsewhere smoke and mirrors) to MangaGamer because while the symptoms/coping mechanisms might be different, the root cause of the issue is the same in both cases. There are no good solutions here. I mean, I guess Sol Press could sue a bank for viewpoint discrimination against them. But they don't have deep enough pockets to tank the legal opposition, never mind the fallout. Licensors decide 'maybe let's not sign with the people making huge waves'. A firestorm of controversy erupts after the smell of good legal drama draws a media circus, and they figure out what exactly Sol Press is selling. Sol Press also isn't big enough to attract the 'don't mess with the money cart' attitude. They see MangaGamer as a good example of what not to do (MG can't unbundle the sites at this point - they can't even get a simple forum back up - so they have to muddle through with the payment processors they can get). What does that leave? Something like what they're doing.

I wonder what they're going to do with that first "h-light novel" they say they've licensed... Patches for a book? And at least one of those companies has payment processor issues on a regular basis. I don't know how MangaGamer keeps having trouble, but they have had to repeatedly change payment processors, and they keep having to go with smaller processors. This means they're prone to things like 'oops we can't take any CC orders, we need a new payment processor, sorry, you can't buy anything from our store right now.' Which takes weeks to sort out every time it happens. Here's an interesting article on how bad things can be. I don't know why Fakku or Denpasoft don't have trouble the way MG does. (I've got a pretty good inkling why Jast doesn't; they're affiliated with J-List and no banker is going to play silly games and risk pissing off the J-list account holder.)

Damn ninjas. Was in the middle of transcribing the exact same list! Quit reading my mind like that; you'll go blind. They also announced this Bunny Girl game and gave it a release date (Sept 6, 2019). And I'm not sure what 'kimihime' is, probably one of their LN's? [Edit: it's My Fair Princess] It's got a date also - August 16th.

Actually, some of the katakana in the still-frame "click here to play" preview for the OP appear to spell out something that's consistent with "Dei Gratia". I suspect they haven't actually altered anything.

Was wondering when someone would bring up the Koihime series. Koihime Musou (the one in English) is worth looking at. MC-kun is put into a position where, historically, dudes would actually have a harem, so it's not as completely ridiculous as it usually is. And the characters actually manage to each be interesting and well written (which, considering the sheer number, is no mean feat).

See my post above for my thoughts on the game's content (I am not desensitized to it at all). 1) Yeah, I'll agree with you on the reason Euphoria ends up being recommended. When I talked about Funbag Fantasy, I said more or less the same thing: Most of the time, porn doesn't have a decent plot attached to it because the people writing it know that's not what folks are after. It's why many monster girl games give really silly 'explanations' for why monster girls of all different races are in love with you, involving things like 'your sperm is super concentrated magical energy'. Much easier to just say that and move on to the orgies than to worldbuild a unique culture and backstory for each girl and actually tie them into the plot. So when you see a game that *does* bother, that makes it something special just because - writers don't bother. This was true of Funbag Fantasy and it's true of Euphoria. 2) This game is a serious test to my stance, but doesn't change it: Everybody has their own kink, and basically kink is harmless. Yes, it is true that some very small number of actual pedophiles are big into loli hentai, and likewise some rapists are big into depictions of sexual violence like Euphoria, and some school shooters were big into violent video games, and so on and so forth. But those people are messed up, and that's why they're into those kinks. Not the other way around. The vast majority of folks don't have (or cause) any such problems. I.e. - Euphoria is not for me, but that doesn't matter. It's ultimately still a work of fiction, and there's no sense looking down on it or on people who enjoy it, just because it happens to be about a thing I find queasy and unsettling. 3) I'll bet that most of the folks who praise Euphoria for the plot, but have very low tolerance for rape and the other stuff? They didn't actually go through the 30 h-scenes. They're like me, and used ctrl to skip all of that stuff. Because GAAAH! MY EYES!

If by "premium" you mean "charge the customary price", then yeah. $39.99 was a pretty standard price back in the old days, for games like Kango Shicyauzo or Come See Me Tonight. Sekai Project just gets hate because they give people discounts.

I recently rediscovered that thread. Apparently, I'd commented on how ridiculous it was that a girl would see her pet climb into a hole in the wall - then get into the hole in the wall, despite there being three prior games in the series where this had happened before. Well, fool that I was, I hadn't accounted for the possibility that each game starred a different main character. That someone would take a threadbare premise like that... And release basically the same game four times. (Imouto Paradise, of course, is completely different. Never mind that it's basically the same game repeated three times. So far. Onii-chan.) Actually, I'll submit that the English title is much better than the Japanese title, which reads like a technical manual for assembling Ikea erotica. I mean, honestly. 'So I inserted a suppository' is an uninspired and mind-numbingly obvious follow-on from the first half. In contrast, the title in English is an allusion to an existing siscon property, and has the kind of punch and pizazz that generates buzz. I mean, look at this topic.

Well, ANN's coverage here seems to say some of the writers have returned: https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2019-05-01/navel-makes-shuffle-episode-2-game/.146302 | Baria Ago is credited again with the original series draft, and Kōta Takeuchi, Jackson Oh (original Shuffle!), Higashinosuke, and Fumihiko Kuwabara are writing the scripts.

Very low. Because of a 'management change', Navel quit working with MangaGamer and Shuffle / Soul Link were discontinued. (If you want Tick Tack / Really Really, I would pick them up, by the way - eventually those contracts will come up for renewal and they probably won't get renewed). In other words, the people at Navel who supported working with MangaGamer left, and were replaced by new folks who weren't interested. He said 'let's go to Steam with the PS2 version' and it did have some new routes, but it wasn't Essence. There could've been another management change. The ones that came in a few years ago could say 'well that didn't work' and try again. But probably they'll just ignore the western market.

Didn't the original writer die?