Decay

This kind of thing is pretty common in VNs that have characters in the backgrounds.

3 or 4 out of 5. I quite liked the first chapter in ef. This is a really weak opening in comparison. And from what I've heard, chapter 2 doesn't get much better, although I rated Chapter 1 on its own merits.

At multiple points while playing it I actually thought that this VN was perfect for @Tiagofvarela

http://fuwanovel.net/reviews/2016/09/02/supipara-chapter-01-spring-has-come/ Better late than never, right? I did not like this VN much, as some people who have talked to me recently about it may have noticed. I guess there's a reason it bombed in Japan, huh?

You're putting too much stock into the adjectives Aroduc uses. He is by default an extremely salty individual and would call the best offer he's ever received "grossly inadequate" if it falls below the rate of high-level professional translation work outside the industry. SP has been known to pay better than JAST and MG, in any case. The real reason he rejected their counter offer is likely not because of the low amount of money offered, but the fact that he'd have to hand his work off to them and walk away. That seems to me to be the main sticking point here. He doesn't want to sell his work, he wants to be involved in the process. And SP seems to have other plans. I'm reluctant to speculate on this any further due to the absence of any real details.

My thoughts on this is that it grants way too much power to corporate entities with lawyers and teams of people who can send DMCA notices and now Youtube guidelines notices in order to disincentivize content that is critical of them. I'm mainly concerned about the fact that many of these videos exist only because people can make money by doing them, and Youtube is giving corporate bullies another tool to effectively silence their critics by removing their source of revenue. Youtube's new content restriction guidelines for monetization are insanely restrictive and basically gives them free reign to take down anything that they don't want to hear. Released a video review critical of the new Call of Duty game? Controversial opinion, you're not allowed to make money off that. Released a video "in partnership" with Activision talking about how rad the new Call of Duty game is? Gotta get a swimming pool to fit all this money in. The end result is a future where there are no more professionally produced content on Youtube containing critical thought because there's no money in it for them, and instead you can expect an even greater non-stop flood of paid shills gushing endlessly at the top of their lungs. The problem with this is that I'm not necessarily morally opposed to the move, this change was spurred on by what youtube's advertisers want, and advertisers have a right to select the kind of content they associate themselves with. That itself is a right I want to defend. The main issue is that Youtube doesn't give their video creators any choice in the matter. There's no way to find advertisers that want to associate with the kind of content you produce. Youtube is meant to be an open platform for this kind of thing but restrict all monetization to content that can only appeal to mainstream audiences. This both scares away niche advertisers and producers of niche content, completely defeating the point of creating an open platform. If Youtube wants to go down this road of allowing advertisers to dictate the content they wish to associate with, they really need to implement a system that allows for greater diversity in advertising and for producers of niche or opinionated content to partner with the right kind of advertisers, instead of essentially blocking off large swathes of content creators from earning any money. And they need to protect these creators of niche content from the corporate entities who try to bully them off the site.

The "anti-SP sentiment" is very heavily exaggerated by the crowd who believes that their insular and niche communities represent the whole of the visual novel fandom. When in reality the vast majority of VN fans and buyers exist outside of Fuwa, Reddit, 4chan, vndb, etc. At most they're lurkers, remaining silent because they have nothing to say on the matter.

HALT! HAAaaAAaALT!

Nothing has been cut or modified in the Steam version of the game, it's all there.

As far as I know, large portions of the game were completely rewritten in one of the post-release patches.

Besides... Look at this fluctuation. That isn't fluctuation in actual steam owners, that's fluctuation in Steamspy's reporting. One day they'll say it's 2100 plus or minus 1200, a few days later it's 950 plus or minus 600, then nine days later it's back up to being 2100 plus or minus 1200, and there's no way to know what's real. Steamspy is useful to get general ideas about some things, like we can see that Tokyo Babel has probably sold better than Fata Morgana has thus far, but please don't attempt to extrapolate actual sales figures from this kind of highly unreliable data. Games need to have far more sales to be able to be measured somewhat consistently.

Steamspy is definitely a form of speculation and it is known to be highly inaccurate when it comes to products with low amounts of sales (less than 10,000)

Gahkthun didn't do very well, either. Maybe MG broke even on it, maybe they didn't. MG has always been and seems like they'll continue to be the kind of company that doesn't mind taking minor hits or not making much money on some "prestige" releases while they rake in the money elsewhere. The MG staff has been super down on the sales of both Gahkthun and Tokyo Babel, with people like Doddler and Conjueror claiming that they are both far below what they'd like to see from these kinds of titles. What that means is that you'll continue to see one or two titles like these a year instead of them going whole hog and licensing a ton of liar soft stuff. Notice how they haven't really announced a new chuuni/action title at all this year?

Well, I don't like it much either, lol. But it's hard to deny how popular it has become. I see Rem vs Ram waifu wars crop up in the most unexpected of places, such as random twitch stream chats. And it's all over social media right now.

Nah. Re:Zero is easily the most discussed and hyped anime since Attack on Titan. I would say that Attack on Titan did a better job of reaching the western mainstream crowd while Re:Zero is doing a better job of reaching the otaku crowd here.

I mean, ef opened up with a dramatic love triangle. Supipara is basically a simple moege in comparison.

Hope things are going okay for you guys.

You should still do so! They're going to be releasing an 18+ version and the translation team is remaining the same so it's not like anything should be drastically different for you.

Not fully true, it is still being edited.

Yes, after deciding that the all-ages version was superior and should be prioritized for reasons related to gameplay and extra content, they also decided they wouldn't bother releasing the separate adult version. Is it also censorship in your mind that JAST probably will never consider a Tanuki Soft game because of loli content? I see no wrongdoing on the part of JAST relating to Aselia the Eternal.

Indeed, and so they did release whichever version they wanted. I have no reason to believe their reasoning changed between being a fan translation and being picked up by JAST.

JAST and their translators chose the version of the game they felt was best. I remember reading the reasonings from the translators from the time it was still a fan patch and they seemed sound to me. I know JAST later said some things about the loli content but that's not the reason why the all-ages version was chosen in the first place. It does not really strike me as censorship. Additionally, I find it very hard to believe that the entire scandal was manufactured when it ended up chasing one of the movie's female leads off of twitter due to the sheer volume of racist and misogynistic insults she was receiving.

It's funny you bring up Ghostbusters, where it was the misogynists who fired the first shots and tried to stop the movie from even happening in some cases, along with mass harassment cases the likes of which makes AVGN's case look like child's play. All because they had the audacity to star women instead of men. The reaction to Ghostbusters was indeed blatantly misogynistic, and a defense against that isn't censorship.

Well, this thread very quickly devolved into a matter of semantics. Going back to the original topic at hand, how coerced are you imagining these developers being when they make alterations to the games they're developing? Because it seems to me that in most of these cases, they actually do it willingly. Stuff like Satan being turned into Prince of Darkness in Shadowverse being called censorship is absurd to me. As is calling that outfit change I originally tweeted about. They also called out a shadowverse character being changed to reveal less cleavage, yet there's still so much card art in that game revealing tons of skin. I do not know why they made the change they did, but if I was to guess, they genuinely believe that more people will enjoy the game by doing so. Why else would they do that? Thing is, you portray it as some desperate situation where these companies are forced to do these things, yet no one is holding a gun to their heads.

I do remember how for a good year it was the best selling VN ever in the west until Steins;Gate toppled it (pre-steam), and it's still a strong contender on Steam. How many bundles has Agarest 1 been in compared to the sequels? Also, this is purely personal opinion, but I thought Agarest was boring, poorly designed trash and skipped the sequels after playing the first and coming to hate it.