Narcosis

THIS. Don't expect anything to change, unless both developers and consumers of their works will be able to cope well with those issues.

You're asking whether it's possible to make visual novels more popular on the west? That's not possible and judging from the past, I doubt it will ever change. Visual novel market by definition is condemned to be a niche, thus you can forget about "popularity"; that word simply won't ever fit well to vn's. There's a couple of factors that makes things popular, you'd have to take into considertation: high accessibility, admiration, comprehensibility. Visual novels have none of these; it's a medium targeted at very specific part of our society - mostly intelligent people, those who like to read a lot and those who are either familiar or remain fans of japanese popculture. At the same time, any means to change these factors and make it better, will actually only cause harm to visual novels; it's because if you take away all those important things - the anime-styled graphics, specific vocabulary and form of presentation - they won't be visual novels anymore; thus, sacrificing certain parts of this medium to increase awarness through western consumers is futile, as most of them won't ever become actual consumers in the first place. You should rather ask yourselves what kinds of people could actually become potential consumers; you'll see, that possibilities in this case are really limited and everything is self-contained, just like the japanese market itself. I'd rather say the only thing that would really matter is that the industry should try to grow a bit more before we start to talk about conquering the gaming world; we need actual western developers, producing high quality games. We need games, which aren't simply otaku-pandering crap like Sakura Spirit, but games which revolve around western-themed settings, while retaining the most important factors - the graphics, style, presentation and form. The only way to make more people interested in visual novels would be to make games, which are really close to us, something we could relate to. So far, I've yet to see a single, good western visual novel, including all the aforementioned elements. Western developers often look up to japanese vn's way too much, without any sort of consideration for their own market. This makes western vn's poorly made clones, which will never even partially match the level of decent japanese vn's. they need to make another step and stop the weeaboo-centric pandering. Otherwise western industry will always remain within it's pit of despair.

It won't. In case of SP it will have an outright negative effect on the whole western industry. It's the same as getting a chance to reedem your soul and utterly failing; there's no second chance available. Currently people are only buying SP out of two reasons - it's cheap, while art encourages people and everyone already knows it's bad, so they're getting it for the lulz, or check whether it's really true as people say. There are no reedeming qualities. If anything, reading this visual novel gives indigestion to fans and will only confirm the rest of gaming community, that all vn's are like this and should be avoided at all costs. Sakura spirit is everything bad about western visual novels, with it's art gone completely to waste. You have my utmost gratitude, Gare :>

I'm sorry, but your post doesn't make any sense. Just because certain types of content or cliches exist within works, it does not mean they only serve as some sort of a bait to encourage consumers. In most cases, they exist because authors either thought it would be fun to include them, or because they matter, be it story or gameplay wise. Saying vn's use porn to encourage playing them is a bit of an exaggeration; in the same spirit, we could say as well that porn industry exists to encourage worldwide procreation. Sakura Spirit wasn't aiming to be any sort of an extraordinary work to start with; it's an indie (western doujin) game with lots of fanservice and naughtiness, and that's preety much fine. At times you might simply want to relax, both physically and psychologically, instead of getting all "deep and dramatic". Games like Sakura Spirit exist to serve that purpose. Tragic writing and really poor execution are the only problems, which make it hard to call the game enjoyable. On the other hand, graphics are really good; especially the backgrounds. I'd say they are on par with high quality jp titles. Too bad the rest doesn't live up to them.

SP is currently doing a giveaway of ten copies through rafflecopter. If you want to try, but feel that spending those few bucks would still seem like a waste, it's a perfect opportunity to try your luck.

Wow, I wasted 25LP; game crashed during daily song, just after the refill. I don't feel like playing anymore _-_

Just as I thought. I guess that possiblity to do the hard song twice makes a difference, even if you're playing more casually; but then, it's hard to call playing SIF like that, if you're sacrificing your daily schedule just to play the game as much as possible. I might try using some gems later on, before the event ends, since I only used one so far. I'm not sure if it's worth it that much, since 15-20 stones is quite a lot and people will propably start spamming them before the event ends, which will make staying up in the top 1k more difficult. I seriously need to reach higher rank to get that 50LP limit; I'm at 48 now and it makes participating in those events highly inneficient compared to those, who are already above 50. This isn't fair at all, haha.

Check out the first post. How is it possible you're up so high in the ranking? Gems do not give that much of an advantage, unless you spam them and 5-10 isn't that much. Events are more about the number of event songs you play, rather than the score since a a fully FC'ed hard song doesn't give that much of an advantage against two songs on normal; it's only more efficient, but then you need 45 event points for one and the daily special song gives 16. With my 48 LP I'm able to do 3 of them, which is 1,5 event song on normal, or a single hard song. I'm not sure how people are capable to reach such scores so fast without mass spaming stones... unless that's what happens in most cases. Could someone enlighten me?

So guys, how many loveca stones have you used up so far?

Why not. Perhaps it will finally give me an incentive to read Little Busters.

I'm not going to bother even if they would give it to me for free, lol.

I lol'd.

If you haven't seen it yet, Sakura Spirit is out on Steam. Enjoy your softcore porn.

A wise reminder - learn to use spoiler tags when placing embed videos. Few youtube songs might be nothing, but when this topic will get full pages, tons of them loading at once will kill any CPU; you propably wouldn't like that to happen. Some music from a bunch of my favourite artists, I've been listening to more often this week:

Right now it doesn't matter anymore. If it would be me, I wouldn't even ask community; I'd go along with the policy and remove direct link downloads for licensed vn's and properly update their respective repo pages, but keep the torrents and create a batch file with all the links available, so those who would be interested could still access them. As long as you keep that stuff hidden and out of sight from the general public, the likelyhood of getting a C&D or other crap goes down to nearly zero. In most cases, the costs and time required to fight piracy outweighs any possible gains, so unless you're handing out torrent links left and right on the front page of your website, there's a very little chance anyone will become interested to try and shut you down.

First one was a song reward. Second one was from regular scout x3 I did moments after the song. I sense a conspiracy.

Dobacco already stated on Twitter, they found a solution for the 18+ version and Steam already approved it. They plan to share more info about this in the future, so stay tuned.

I'm currently at 40 stones. Need ten more for the next draw.

It just shows there's a huge market for story-driven doujin games, be it jrpg's, simulations or visual novels; Carpe Fulgur is a good example of that as well. Ero content aside, there's a whole lot to reach out for. I only hope SP remains as perceptive.

In 95% of cases, it's entirely possible to move your save files, though different games use different methods to store data and player progress. Im most cases, save files are created as external files (they are rarely stored internally), either somewhere within the game folder directory, or system's user settings folders. If you need any help, write down all the game titles first. That way it'll be easier for us to guide you to the appropriate save file locations.

That's a very wide generalization. You don't see less porn nowadays; publishers and creators simply switched to digital distribution platforms. Only those, who don't adapt have issues. As much as a lot of services partially suffer from the strength of internet which overshadows certain outdated business models, the real problem lies within the markets themselves - there's a lot more competition nowadays than there ever was, and it's much harder to stay afloat, unless you're really good in said business and/or have quality products with attractive pricing to offer to your consumers. I could say the biggest dillema we have to cope with is the fact that western culture still isn't feeling secure enough to talk about erotic life in the public; the vast majority of people will point out fingers and state how "bad" those games are, trying to justify their point of view with ridiculous statements, that eroge like this corrupts kids, those who play them are people with issues etc. You know how it rolls. It's kind of getting tiresome; as much as things have been slowly changing for the better, certain countries with the most exposition and at the same time the most morally radical communities (such as US) have became increasingly more possesive about it. I'm not even entirely sure where does it come from, but it's certainly a problem, especially when such people try to force their worldviews upon others. As for the Carpe Fulgur guys, they have been working in the doujin industry for long enough to know certain things; As much as I can't agree with them entirely, it's how everything rolls right now on the west. Besides, they are dealing with a specific part of doujin industry already and I doubt they would ever have the need to readjust; after all, they are sitting on a goldmine and it's only up to them on how they want to dig in. In other words - they are playing it safe and they have no need, nor aren't interested to put their business at risk. News edit: One of the SP's CEO's stated on twitter, they have a possible solution for Grisaia's 18+ western release and Steam already approved it. More info in the future.

Actually, if SP would like to give a fuck, they can take the patch down as well. There's been plenty of examples in the past where C&D's were given left and right, even despite the fan translators didn't actually host anything on their websites, nor supported piracy by offering torrents of games they made fan TL's for. A self-published fan translation is already an act of violation against copyright in terms of localized games. It's because no one else can simply have the right to offer any sort of localization, other than it's actual owners, unless otherwise stated; more over, when they are profiting from it, be it even from adds placed on their website. On the other hand, Fuwanovel does not have to physically remove the patches, nor torrents at all. As long as you won't simply hand out the links on the front pages and avoid massive hyperlinking (you can host through XDCC, or store the link DB's in depos), there's no way to even legally prove that Fuwanovel violated anything.

The only thing that boogles me is a simple fact that western publishing companies are unable to sell their eroge. They can't even sell sex. You're reading it right. Can you fall any lower than that? They localize eroge titles to the west and complain later on, that they are unable to sell enough copies to sustain their business and make a living out of it. I see various people placing all the blame on the community itself, while it's the publishers, who are actually doing something wrong. How is that possible, they aren't even unable to sell their products properly? Please enlighten me.

You could try to install clean FF and see if the problem persists on another browser. If that's the case, it might as well be an issue with your ISP or connection. What about other websites? Are they loaded properly? How is your internet connection handled? Is it from a private provider, public or connected to your phone/telecomunications provider? Plus, what OS are you using? 7, Vista or XP? I also hope you're using a decent antivirus software and didn't caught anything lately. How did it happened? What were you doing before it happened? In most cases, it's best to search for clues in that period of time. Aren't you actually having some issues with firewalls?

LL:SIF actually looks better on smaller res screens, since the art gets upscaled in case of large resolutions. I own an LG Swift L7II and graphics are beautiful and crisp on it's IPS 4.3 inch screen. Since I spend a lot of time at home lately, I tend to simply place the phone somewhere solid and play using my index fingers; I used to play holding phone in air and using my thumbs, but it's not as accurate and comfortable as placing your device down. Hand position and height tends to be important, as well. If you place your device way too high or too low, you'll feel a decrease in accuracy. In my case, the main desk in my room seems to be the best to play LL:SIF; other places aren't as good and I usually play much worse. I felt the same in the beggining; right now I'm currently managing to FC easily all the previous hard modes I skipped and besides like 3 songs I haven't done yet on hard, I;m already good enough to pass any new song without bigger issues. It's all about constant training and improvement and you'll see the difference after getting used to play LL:SIF. A decent team also works miracles, since it has that sort of a psychological effect - you feel more comfortable and they make it easier to max up songs without the hassle of having to fret about every single great note. I've fallen down tremendously within the event ranking. Guess I'll have to finally use some stones and grind a bit.