Nandemonai

That's easy, Sekai Project is taking the deals that Jast and MG would have walked away from. Jast cancelled the release of Cleavage because the original uncensored CG data has been lost; in their estimation, that meant there was no point in bothering with a release. Neither Jast nor MangaGamer would ever license a title where the developer made them remove the h-scenes. For MangaGamer, the closest would be when they removed the voices from Kara no Shoujo and Koihime back in 2011 when they were a lot smaller, and they simply couldn't afford to pay the license fees. For Jast, the closest would be Shiny Days, and the whole mess around the unofficial patch; and that was for legal reasons (as in, Mr. Payne does not want to go to jail). If a Japanese VN company is open to releasing in the west (more and more nowadays), but nervous about backlash over the h content (which is a lot of them, they remember RapeLay), Jast or MG are much less likely to cut a deal with them. If they can't get a deal finalized that includes the H-scenes, they just won't sign it. Sekai Project has been willing to sign those deals; so they have all-ages versions of some titles, but haven't been able to get a deal signed for complete versions. Jast and MG are eroge companies first, and all-ages companies second (if Jast even has any all-ages releases; I'm not sure they even do Edit: Forgot about Aselia). Sekai Project - well, by their own admission in this AMA, they chose to focus on all-ages, and were surprised at the amount of pushback that they got. So it has nothing to do with "having no idea how to run a business". The bad PR that comes from not knowing how to properly say "still in the works, we can't comment" is totally their fault, but in general, when negotiations are ongoing, companies keep their mouths shut. All of them do. Funimation doesn't say why they can't get show XYZ; they just say "there are some issues we need to work out with the licensor". And I guarantee Jast and MangaGamer have equally strict confidentiality policies regarding their negotiations. (Don't believe me? Go ask Doddler why he had to review Oyatsu no Jikan all those years ago.) It's just that, Jast and MangaGamer don't sign all-ages-only deals. Sekai Project does, and then keeps negotiating to make the adults-only release happen afterward. Jast and MangaGamer avoid these complicated PR problems, not because they know what they're doing (Jast is so slow because it's terribly run, although that's been changing recently) and Sekai Project does not - but because Sekai Project says "something is better than nothing" whereas Jast and MG will just not release the title at all if they can't get the h-scenes.

Actually, the most interesting bit I saw in the AMA was this fascinating tidbit here: "Working together we've built up a family of 15 full time and a buncha great contractors who all make up our family." Well, isn't that interesting? 15 people is a lot. Among other things, that means they are spending at least a million dollars a year on payroll, after you include benefits and their contractors. This is not true, actually. It took them several months (which is several months longer than it should have taken to at least just say "Sorry, we thought we'd have info to share, but complications came up, please be patient"), but they did eventually release more information. Negotiations for Baldr Sky are (were) still ongoing so they couldn't confirm anything yet, but they're working on it. As for Maitetsu, they "believe they have a solution that will make everybody happy". I, for one, take this to mean '18+ release forthcoming, content to be released via 'unofficial patch' method'. They know the only way to make everybody happy is to put it out, yet they deliberately chose to be obscure; that can only mean something like Jast USA's unofficial patch for Shiny Days. Sure, it's not as much, or as concrete, as we wanted. But it's not true to say we still have no info.

Seems like; that'd be my guess, yeah. They seem to have taken the lesson that $40 for VNs doesn't seem to work very well on Steam, so it's better to cut it in half and charge their $40 twenty bucks at a time.

The goals they have in mind for the Kickstarter are a bit high. Maybe that's what he meant? That's literally the only concern that I have at the moment. I was honestly not even expecting the 18+ content; after all, that means they're creating an all-new version of the game, basically, just for Western release. Also, it releasing in May is ... not something I expected at all. (Obviously that means the translation is done, or almost done, meaning they only need to wait for all the changes on the Japanese side to be implemented.) When do they plan on launching the Kickstarter for real? How long are Prefundiae usually open for?

Yes, it is. Season Pass is a marketing term that publishers use for a bundle of DLC at a cheaper price than you would pay if you snagged it individually, sold up front with the release of the game. You get a discount, in exchange for buying the product sight-unseen. Here, you're calling a bunch of "free DLC" a "season pass", except that $0 for the "season pass" isn't any cheaper than $0 for the free DLC to begin with.

I care about more content (the fandisc stuff), but not if it's not supposed to be particularly good. As for the Vita version ... well, I own a Vita, but I don't really need another copy of the game for it. I might change my mind if it turns out that I really like it when I do play it, in which case I might want it on my Vita to re-read (say) on the train sometime. But I haven't played it yet. This is why Steins;Gate is the only VN I own for the Vita (technically, my Root Double pledge comes with one, but I don't even know if that reward came out yet) - and that's because I played it when Jast released it, so when I heard the Vita version was coming out I was like "sold!" (mostly to encourage them to release more, but also so I could play it again).

In one respect, the game did wrong. There are too many slider positions. Most of them are approximately the same. In fact, the FAQ I was using said only ever used 1 (one from empty), 4 (middle), or 7, except for one or two times. Basically, by giving you a bar split into 9 segments, but only ever using 3 of them, it creates an illusion of much greater choice than is actually there, nearly all the time. They really should have just had 3 settings, for "low/medium/high", and called it a day. Because when the FAQ says 'set Salyu to 1, and Mr. T to 7', almost always you can set (2, 7) or (1, 6) instead of (1, 7) and the game will never notice the difference.

Your point is perfectly valid - it sounds like, despite what some people involved in the translation said, people that haven't played Steins;Gate would be completely lost trying to stumble through S;G0 - so I think really the only issue is that the wording could have been tweaked a bit more. Rather than listing "Definitely a sequel" as a con, it might have been better worded as "Does not stand alone" or something similar.

I had the misfortune of playing Sora's route first. When I went to play the others, I was much less impressed than I was with hers. Sora was a great character, they had good chemistry, and the story was very interesting. (I still need to get the true ending in that game. Computer failures kept getting in my way.)

Why would a game being legitimately released ever be a bad thing?

I've played more VNs than many, but not nearly "hundreds". And being restricted to English VNs, means many of the ones I have played are from the dark days of official localizations, when mainly crap yarugee was being localized. Ones that stick out particularly: - Yuka from Crescendo. (I swear, I was going to pick her before I saw two other people in this thread do it. I was into her before she was popular, god damn it! ) - Sora from Ever 17. - Sari from Nocturnal Illusion. (Big surprise, I named someone from a game I liked enough to work on.) She's probably the most memorable of the game's cast, for reasons I won't elaborate on (the game's so old that so few who have played it are still fans that it's come back around to spoiler territory!) - Sei from Koihime Musou. Pretty much everything she does is memorable, and half of it is completely hilarious.

I don't read Japanese quickly enough to follow much of the Japanese market, but there's still a few. I know someone recently trashed on it here, but this review still makes it sound amazing: Gekkou no Carnevale . I hear good things about Mashiro iro Symphony and Sekai de Ichiban NG na Koi. I also want Shuffle Essence and SKM god damn it!

Fuck you, Fuwa, for not letting me quote a quote. Now I have to manually copy/paste this in order to respond to it: So if you read carefully, this statement says that you can play Steins;Gate 0 without being lost if you haven't played the original. This is probably true; you might be a little lost here and there, but if they were careful it shouldn't be too bad. Note, however, what this does not say. It does not say that this game doesn't spoil the original Steins;Gate, or that playing S;G0 first won't diminish your experience of the original S;G. Instead, it says that if you don't care about spoiling S;G (which has been out for a while) you can play Zero without a problem.

Wait, it's not dubbed, is it? (My copy arrived yesterday, but I haven't had a chance to get into it yet. Stupid cold.)

Ah, yes, Kara no Shoujo. A game that is perfectly willing to silently fail you during investigations, while making it appear you've found everything. I actually respect that; I feel like it enhances the "I'm a detective" feeling by making your performance actually matter. What I don't like is during one of the later investigation scenes, where investigating in the wrong order will prevent you from finding a vital piece of evidence for no good reason.

Snow Drop would have been a lot more tolerable if it had bothered to explain its own game mechanics. Once you figure out that there are a set number of time periods, and a time period is always taken up when you pick somewhere to go (even if all that happens is you go there and the game says "nothing to see here"), then the game isn't too hard to figure out. Instead it gives no signal that time always passed (like a clock or something). It also not giving you any idea where people were was a sin. But still not as big a sin as its time mechanic (which is counter-intutive, makes no sense, and never explained). Tokimeki Checkin! also had some pretty strict requirements to get onto its routes. The choices often appeared to be random, but in retrospect many of them made sense (insofar as the responses you would get would in hindsight be the thing that got you to interact with the character more), but it was also fairly inexplicable.

To elaborate, Rance (the main character, where the series gets its name) was specifically designed as a parody of the standard RPG goody-two-shoes heroic main character. He is anything but; he was designed, basically, to be the reverse: a self-centered callous asshole. I've never actually played any of them, because that really isn't my cup of tea. But I'm familiar with the general concept.

If they're out of beta, they could launch in December. Arguing against that is that MangaGamer typically tries to stick to one release per month, and Himawari releases 12/6 - but this is mere circumstantial evidence. More circumstantial evidence is from their latest status update (dated 11/12): There are several games at "beta testing in progress", but (other than Himawari) only the Rance games are "beta testing complete". However, note: in that update, Rance 5D is described as "beta testing complete" whereas Rance 6 is described as "Beta testing in progress". So it's already not as up to date as the latest tweet, which is that they were out. Other games that were 'in beta testing' might have also finished testing in those same 2 weeks. So, what's my takeaway? It's highly likely that Rance is the next release after Himawari. (I believe they're releasing as a double pack?) Beyond that, not sure. Even that's not 100% guaranteed, and even if it's right, it's not 100% guaranteed that there's a late December release. Since there's another release in December (and holidays coming up) MG might want to ease up a bit. Releasing Rance in January gives them some time to line up the next release in Feb - rather than release Rance in Dec and then have only a few weeks to get something else ready for Jan. Hard to say; might make December, if not, probably not much later.

Sure, this is happening, but I have a hard time seeing it squeeze Sekai Project / MangaGamer / Jast out of the market completely. Okay, an outfit like Kodansha can dispense with contracting out to a third party localization group that knows what it's doing, because Kodansha knows what it's doing. Kodansha's a huge publishing conglomerate, they've translated things into English before. But more often than not, when the Japanese have run the show, the result has been highly questionable translations. I mean, MangaGamer itself is proof of that point; they had to bring on experienced native English-speaking staff in order to turn the ship around. MoeNovel ... IMHHW had to have been approved for release in its current state by people who did not understand how bad it was. It's going to be hard for Japanese b-game companies (which are usually small and have rapidly-shifting staff makeups) to get the in-house expertise to know when they get good translators, and when they get bad. Eventually they'll catch on to this fact, and (the smaller ones especiaily) will start looking for a group of translators that have done this kind of work before. Well, what is that but a localization outfit? Might as well sign with MangaGamer and take advantage of their programming team to handle the port for you. Yeah, there are large parts of the industry that have consolidated into big groups, and those big groups will be big enough to have a localization arm. However, that already describes MangaGamer (which essentially IS the localization arm of a Japanese company) , and we know MangaGamer has been successful enough that at least one other company has approached them and said "please translate our stuff for us" (Hentai Industries, was it? The really small nukige company.)

The logic is fairly clear. It's, um, grounded in a lot of speculation and rumor, but it's fairly clear. If Sekai Project has given itself a bad reputation in Japan, that will make it harder for them to make deals. If they have strong sales in spite of these problems, they'll probably be okay. But if they have a bad reputation, and a track record of flops, that could indeed translate into serious trouble for them. Now, this is contingent on believing that SP's drama on the internets has managed to make it back to Japan and negatively impact their rep there. I'm not at all sure I believe that's true.

Yeah, I mean, it's obvious that there was a lot of drama around Sekai Project recently. It's also obvious that Sekai Project causes a lot of that drama by communicating poorly (not making announcements when they said they would, not clarifying for months afterward, Dovac blowing up on twitter that he never even wanted to be in the VN business when he runs a VN company, these are not good PR). And I've heard rumors that this company or that company was talking to SP and backed off. But that's just that - rumor. I mean, I highly doubt that even Sekai Project would ever issue a press release saying "Fuck you internet drama queens, you just cost us the licenses for OMGWTFBBQ The Masterpiece and When Tsunderes Attack Plus Mosaic". And really, it's not like even Sekai Project would really know for sure; only the Japanese companies that walked away would really know. Not like it matters, neither the Japanese companies nor their overseas partners will ever issue anything more specific than vague "issues came up". And that's only when an already-announced deal falls apart; if nothing had been announced yet, then ... nothing ever is. Narcosis, if you actually do have some kind of insider info, you really shouldn't be spilling the beans here about it.

Mostly the "problem", if you can even call it that, is that a new account's first message is nothing but gushing promotion for some new thing none of us have heard of. Now, it's on topic, so there's nothing wrong with that. But that's why you got asked if this was marketing or spam. Because companies occasionally try to astroturf like this. You don't seem to be an astroturfer; you're fine. Just something to be aware of. As for the actual topic ... uh, I have essentially 0 interest in any yaoi game. Sorry

That's not good enough, as others have noted. That definition is generic enough to include yaoi (which isn't otome because it's yaoi).

Interesting. So round up to 10K lines to account for tweaked lines in the original (total guesstimate), and let's say the target is 200 days to finish the translation. That's ... 50 lines per day. Huh, much more doable than I thought at first. And thanks for taking the time to respond to some random dude on the Internet questioning whether you know what you're doing

That's true, hadn't considered that. It would depend on how much is new in Noah, then. Are these new routes or just new endings? Because the individual character endings in Steins;Gate are cool, but they aren't really proper routes.