Nandemonai

G-Collections was originally kind of like MangaGamer is now: wholly owned by CD-Bros. Then CD-Bros almost completely collapsed. GC now is a brand owned by Jast USA. That happened because Peter Payne went to CD-Bros, and paid them for the brand name, and all the titles. The new titles released after Sagara Family and Figures of Happiness are titles Peter licensed per the usual way. Nocturnal Illusion and the other handful of really old releases are a strange story. I presume those fall under "old, poorly drafted contracts" because Peter has been able to re-release Nocturnal Illusion numerous times over the years, even though the Japanese company that made the game went under years before.

The thing is that this isn't a very peculiar case. This is the standard way those deals work. That's why anime goes out of print. Witness the giant parade of Aniplex licenses that are slowly expiring out from under all the companies they used to do business with, since they decided 'we'll just charge Japanese prices and release these ourselves'. This is why Muppet Babies is never getting released on DVD, and also why The Muppet Show's episodes on DVD aren't all the same length: a lot of musical numbers got cut out. It's why stuff rolls off of streaming services like Crunchyroll and Netflix all the time. What happens is these contracts come up for renewal on a regular basis. Companies have very low incentive to cancel these contracts in the case of MangaGamer: they literally don't have to lift a finger, and they get more free money. All they have to do is sign a renewal. To date, Navel is the only company to decline to renew one of those contracts. MangaGamer has partnered with many companies, released a few games, then never done any more games from that company (Black Lilith and Propeller, to name a few) but Navel is the only one that took games out of print. In Navel's case, they released the new version of Shuffle! (the one that isn't the one everyone wants) shortly after the contract with MG expired. Now, these contracts are fairly long-term. It's difficult to say when exactly Navel decided not to renew; but I doubt the timing of Shuffle's steam release is a coincidence. I imagine Navel wanted to move to Steam, and to do it themselves. Note that even they couldn't do that while MangaGamer held an exclusive license. They had to wait for it to expire.

In the early days, a lot of Japanese companies didn't know how to write contracts. This is how Harmony Gold still has Macross tied up. But stories like that are why they don't negotiate contracts like that anymore. Typically a contract will be for a limited time (meaning that the rights will eventually expire; witness MangaGamer having to stop selling Shuffle! and Soul Link) but also be an exclusive contract. While the contract is in force, that company will be the only one with rights to release it in whatever territory the license covers. This is because non-exclusive licenses are worthless; why spend a bunch of money translating and promoting a game when someone else can just undercut you? So typically the localization company will demand an exclusive license. However, SakuraGame may not bother. They're not a real publisher. They don't give a crap about their products, they certainly don't spend money on them, and they had games put up briefly that they didn't even have rights for. So it's hard to say.

As far as I know the patch literally changed only a few lines, one of which was (I believe) an 'over 9000' meme. What I heard was that they were considering doing more, but would have had to go back to the company to make any such patch, and the company was like 'we gave you a patch already, go away'.

I very much doubt that there exists a system that will issue "censor the game within 2 weeks or we will delist you" threats 100% automatically without any interaction. If for no other reason than we would already have seen it in action before, by this point, and we haven't. Not to mention that once trolls find out about it, they would make use of it to do far more than just mess with VNs.

They don't make big announcements like that at ACen. They make low-key nukige announcements at ACen. (As in, don't expect Imouto Paradise 3 to be announced there.)

It never bothered me nearly that much. It lets you know what to expect from a con, basically. They're going to announce two things at ACen, not five. Don't expect a lot of announcements from the panel. They are getting kind of lazy, though. They've used this "empty boxes + new partner! annotation" format a few years now. But this year they're throwing it up not even a week before the con (as opposed to last year, where the list of announcements was up months ahead of time and simply got larger as more and more stuff was confirmed). And their annual teaser has basically adopted a standard format, too. Gone are the days when we could figure out a whole con season's worth of announcements from an ill-conceived promo image.

Being good at Japanese doesn't make you a good translator. It's not enough. You also need to be good at English. And you have to care. Plenty of people are good at Japanese and aren't passionate about translating anything at all, much less a VN. But aside from that, we already know that most of the fan translators who are actually pretty good end up going pro. Why would you do something for free when you're good enough to get paid to do it? And we also know there are plenty of really bad fan translators out there. We've seen their work. Wanting to translate a game doesn't make you any good at it.

What do passion, commitment, or confidence have anything to do with the quality of one's Japanese skills?

That's because hardly anybody is using them. If a dongle is applicable only to a specific game, then that game will have to charge a huge premium in price. That's not happening. So games don't do that. Dongles for specific applications are for business applications that cost thousands of dollars (or more!) per license. So that leaves generic dongles that support multiple titles. But this only paints a large target on such devices, the same way Denuvo and SecuRom and CSS and all the other DRM schemes have large targets painted on them. It becomes much more likely someone will decide that cracking the copy protection is worth the effort.

As someone who works in the software industry, I can tell you that this is overblown marketing hype from the people trying to sell these hardware dongles. The problem with a dongle is that the attacker (the customer) has access to it at all times. In other words, there is no such thing as a "dongle that is inaccessible by any cracking tools". I am not one of them, but there are people out there like these guys who figured out how to take over other people's cars using the Internet by reverse engineering the car's systems. If you give them one of these dongles, and let them plug it into a computer that they have administrator access on, then it is all but assured that they can write their own cracking tools and pwn this dongle. They don't even have to crack the encryption. All they have to do is dump whatever's on it, and create a USB device emulator that pretends to be the dongle. That's not to say these dongles are completely worthless. I don't know much about them, so I'm not going to say anything more. But the claim that dongles can't be hacked is almost certainly false.

Indeed. Those characters are not Japanese characters. They're the corrupted gibberish result of trying to display Japanese on a machine without Japanese support enabled. This will not work.

I don't have nice pictures like everyone else. But here goes. * Steins;Gate. A truly brilliant game, featuring a great plot, great characters, that interact with each other well. * Nocturnal Illusion. Big surprise there, a game I retranslated is one of my favorites. I'm sure there are better games out there, but this was both one of the first games I ever played, and one of the best (even if it is out-competed by much better recent games) * Virtue's Last Reward. As much as the third game was a letdown, VLR was brilliant. It took the setup of 999 and amped up the stakes significantly. It had a killer concept. And it has a pretty cool cast. * Koihime Musou. The game has a cast of more than 25 characters, each of which actually has a distinct and memorable personality. It's got an interesting main story and the routes are good too. Sure, the ending is crap. But this is still one of the best games in English (that I've played at least, I'm way behind because I'm a slow reader). Again, not a surprise. I'm translediting SKM.

Not quite. Their library got folded into Jast USA, like several other libraries of early companies that went under. They were originally like MangaGamer is now - a division of a Japanese conglomerate focused on English language releases. The original company folded shortly after Figures of Happiness released because their parent group - CD-Bros - all but collapsed. Peter Payne license rescued all of their titles (well, except the one with very loli characters). After a few years, "G-Collections" started releasing more games from Cd-Bros brands, but those were all done by Jast USA using G-Collections as a brand name. And no, their release quality was not very good. There was no community at the time. Tsukihime - the first real successful fan translation project - was being worked on around the time G-C was imploding. In the old days, you took the translators you could get. And many of the mainstream translators won't touch porn. The game I re-translated - Nocturnal Illusion - is about 6-7 years before G-C started; I'd still consider it in "generation 1" of localizations. Its translation was awful, and is fairly indicative of what to expect.

G-Collections was doing it 15 years ago. They started with Private Nurse in November 2002 and ended with Figures of Happiness, when their parent company imploded in March 2005. Everything afterward was released by Jast (hence the 2 year gap and then only 2 games per year). Granted they didn't hit every month the way MangaGamer has (I can't remember the last time MangaGamer missed a month) but they did it. The difference is that G-C was around 15 years ago. The market was a lot smaller back then. And they had to print and ship actual CDs. They couldn't survive their parent company imploding. Whereas MangaGamer said a few years ago that their back catalog was big enough that they could fund operations off of it. I doubt G-C could have done that. It's not like they had much choice. Sekai said they caught the developer astroturfing the Steam reviews. Now outright lying would be a really dumb thing for them to do, and this isn't like that case where they blindly parroted what someone else told them without checking - they said they caught them. So assuming this in fact really happened, that doesn't leave Sekai Project much of a choice. If Valve catches the dev doing this, they could easily ban not just the developer but also the publisher. Sekai cannot risk their whole library being cut off from Steam (their whole business, basically) so their hand is forced. They have to kill it with fire, which they did. It's a shame because the game sounded interesting, but if you can't trust someone not to burn your house down, then you can't work with them.

You can get some information about publishing figures. Just not anything about visual novels directly. All of the information about licensing fees and licensing terms is very much secret. But there are times when companies get forced to reveal these secrets: when they have to go to court. If you want to sue over something, you have to file the contracts, including real dollar figures, with the court. And court documents are public. Some lawsuits in the video game and anime business have resulted in some real interesting info surfacing over the years. The complete contract between Bungie and Activision for publishing Destiny (which originally contemplated that Destiny 3 would already be out and Destiny 4 would come out next year) can be found here. A writeup of the significant parts (a contract is rather dry and boring) is here. Now, Destiny is a far cry from your average visual novel. But it's the only time a full contract has been released that I could find. A bunch of stuff was released in the lawsuits over Curt Schilling and 38 studios: you can find more here and here (note that the actual document trove is no longer online). But even that's a bit far afield. There is some very interesting license data from the implosion of ADV Films, though. When ADV was falling apart, Funimation sued them over a debt they said they bought from a Japanese company. That led to some dollar figures being released. We know how much ADV paid for certain shows. The list is on ANN and while anime is more popular than VNs, of the three I found, it's the closest match. I'm not going to reproduce the list here (just check ANN). But there are a few things I can say about it: 1) It's not clear what these numbers are. Are these the up-front minimum guarantee prices? Or is this the total amount paid, including the up-front minimum guarantee and all the royalties that were owed? Did they even owe any royalties? The Crunchyroll coverage seems to imply that ADV paid a flat $25K per episode for 009-1. 2) Does this include the costs of translating the show and producing the DVDs? Almost certainly not. $21,335 for a TV show with 39 episodes (UFO Ultramaiden Valkyrie) is not enough money. 3) The numbers vary widely. The lowest price for a TV show is $21,335 for UFO Ultramaiden Valkyrie. That's barely more than the $20K for the Air movie. The highest price is pushing a million: $960K for Kurau Phantom Memory. Four of the listed shows cost ADV more than three quarters of a million dollars, and one more is just under. On the flip side, six others cost less than sixty grand. The most expensive show cost ADV nearly forty five times the least expensive. 4) Licensing costs are probably paid by every company in the business. Even MoeNovel (a Pulltop subsidiary) probably on paper pays Pulltop for the rights. This is something I learned when I got a job. I worked for the phone company for awhile, and I found out my department pays another department for the phone lines. This seemed really weird to me; I was like 'why bother?' My coworkers explained that because of the way budgets work, if that division provided the phones for free, their numbers would look terrible. The cost savings they generated would make everyone else in the company look good, but their bottom line would look terrible. This would lead to them getting punished (for being 'unprofitable') for being successful. Likewise, Moenovel is owned by Will. Money that they generate goes into Will's pockets. But they made that money off of Pulltop properties. So the deals need to be structured in such a way that the Pulltop entity reaps the rewards of Moenovel's success. It is probably safe to assume Moenovel pays something to Pulltop. The only company that might not have to do this 'one part of the company pays another' thing is Frontwing, because they might not have set up a different entity to run the overseas business. It's hard to say. 5) The non-licensing related costs are going to be relatively fixed and predictable. They will be a product of the size (in bytes) of the script, with added complications for things like actual gameplay elements. Scripting costs (engine work) are less predictable, but compared to a 45X variance factor in licensing costs? That's not too significant. 6) Licensing costs vary widely. Sol Press seems to be licensing on the cheap (i.e. not going after famous or hugely-successful Japanese projects). For all but the cheapest licenses, however? Licensing fees likely dwarf all other costs associated with the release. Witch's Love Diary's script is about 1.5 megabytes, or about 750K characters. Now I know MG pays by the character (everyone does) but not how much: if they pay 1.5 cents per, that's about $11K. If they pay 5 cents per, that would be about $37K. [Edit: Apparently some companies pay by the character, some by the line. That probably won't change this math too much.] Both of these guesstimates are on the low end of the ADV price chart. Visual Novel licensing fees are going to be quite a bit lower (they have to be, or there's no business to be done, sales just aren't high enough). But still. 7) For most titles, the licensing fee is probably the biggest cost. Since this is the part that's least predictable, it's extremely difficult to say what a given title might have cost.

Yeah, that's what I figured. Not my cup of tea.

The description sounds really rapey to me. How is it in that sense?

I was looking forward to it, until the reviews started coming out. I still think the original show is one of the best anime I've ever seen, but I don't think I'll even be bothering to watch this new one. Such a shame, really. After I watched the original I was desperate for more.

Uh, we already know that voice acting is really expensive. So expensive that in MangaGamer's early days they had to remove it from two games because they couldn't afford it. So no, they can't. They have to pay for this new voice acting, so they means they have to charge for it.

I know that was a joke, but the people who helped XSEED translate SC are Carpe Fulgur, who have gone on record saying they will never be involved with 18-plus stuff. And no, XSEED never refused to translate the Crossbell arc. Falcom "asked" them to translate Cold Steel first (I'm gonna make you an offer you can't refuse, you know what I'm saying?) because in 2015 Cold Steel was only for PS3 and Vita - both systems that were dying rapidly. Falcom was worried if they did Crossbell first, by the time they'd be ready for Cold Steel the market would have fallen out from under them. It's all explained here: http://xseedgames.tumblr.com/post/120804314195/the-legend-of-heroes-trails-series-localization XSEED has said they want to do Crossbell, but it depends on how well the rest of the series does. Yet every time they talk about the series it's always how much better than they expected it's doing. And the series has been getting announcement after announcement. Since 2015 we've gotten Sky SC. CS1. CS2. Sky The Third. And ports of CS1 and 2. Also, CS3 apparently won't make any sense if you haven't played Crossbell, meaning that CS3 and 4 sales will be hurt if Crossbell isn't out. So I figure Crossbell's got a good chance of getting announced. A lot of people have looked at the situation and drawn different conclusions. It's all just speculation, so there's good reasons behind those opinions. But none of those people speak for XSEED. The fact of the matter is that as far as I know, the only thing XSEED has said is they want to do Crossbell but aren't sure it will be possible. To get on topic, MangaGamer has never announced anything at Anime Boston but nukige or other minor things. Big news always comes at bigger cons later in the season.

Here is a good example of the difference between a bad localization, and a good one: Basically, when you are getting a text-heavy work in translation, your work is as much a product of the translator's writing skills as the original creator's. This is unavoidable. So I'll describe it with a bit of an analogy: Think of a book or a movie you really liked, and then think of one you didn't really like. Now imagine that the writer of the book (or director of the movie) you didn't really like was hired to rework the one you did. Every part of the thing you liked is technically there in some recognizable form, but it's all been changed to be kind of crappy.

Sometimes games don't enforce the reading order they probably should. I think that one of Root Double's biggest problems, for instance, is that the game lets you do either Route A or Route B first. The game would have been much tighter plotted if Routes A and B had been merged into a dual protagonist single route. Route B drags too much, and playing Route B first spoils the stronger route - route A. They're not even seperate stories anyway - they're two different viewpoints of the same story. Then there's Tokyo Babel. Check out the walkthrough - the 'recommended route order' basically should have been mandatory. The game does lock Lilith's route for last, but Raziel and Sorami's routes should also have been locked because too much in Sorami's route assumes you've read Raziel's (both in terms of making no sense without having done so, and cross-route spoilers). On the other hand, to play Tina's route in SakuSaku, I'd have to play Ann's. I am ... not impressed with Ann's character. At all.

Indeed. Extremely unprofessional-looking typos in the promotion material bode almost as well as spelling your own name wrong on a resume.

Jast USA is the oldest h-game translation company still in business. They've been around since the nineties and are 100% legit. They sell physical copies and digital downloads. Double check your order to find out whether you ordered a physical copy, or a download. I made that mistake once. Was very confusing.