sanahtlig

I only have data for titles I've written articles on, like Sakura Swim Club and Shiny Days. I can tell you that my installation guide for the Shiny Days loli restoration patch has gotten many hits. But then again, it's also the only source I know of for the official bugfix patch (JAST no longer hosts it), and I also happen to provide free technical support with no wait (JAST takes weeks or even months to respond to customer support requests). I also don't know official sales numbers for Shiny Days, nor how many pirates are referencing my guide to patch their release version of the game.

Consider this: SteamSpy shows 84k owners for Sakura Swim Club. I've had 88k views on my installation guide for the Steam restoration patch. Seems that Steam gamers might care more than your give them credit for.

The following screenshot should illustrate my point.

A large segment of the potential audience for this game on Steam doesn't a give a damn about JAST or VNs. They have a set of expectations that must be met or they'll just hit the back button. 'Price' is one. 'No perceived censorship' is another. Not to mention that JAST lacks universal payment options that would make it easy for people in certain regions, such as Brazil, to purchase their games. Peter Payne has actually commented on this issue previously. His comments might surprise you.

The JAST version is $45. The Steam version is $27 (and likely even cheaper in other regions). "Redundant" indeed.

The moe fetish-genre is primarily targeted at males.

Depends on how the aftermath is handled. If you end up sacrificing most or all of your 'subjects' in a blood rite to save the world, there's not much left to rule over. It's hard to call it a dictatorship at that point.

Does a quest to conquer the world and rape and/or mindbreak the various world leaders count as anarchism?

A ring-type scratch on an optical disk is the worst kind. The data is written in concentric rings, so a ring-scratch is equivalent to deleting an entire block of data. Whereas a linear scratch can be corrected for because there's copies of the data in the rest of each ring; it just slows down the disk access times.

The Steam version, based on the Japanese PSP version, has extra scenes and CG to replace the adult scenes that were removed, as well as a few extra missions that appear to be separate from the main scenario. You can survey the additional mission content (in Japanese) here. I also edited this explanation into my review.

This is netorare. Just do a tag search on that and you should be able to locate the specific title quickly enough.

Just a reminder that the version of Shuffle being sold on Steam right now has been heavily criticized. Not to mention the shenanigans with the adult version being taken down by Navel.

It sounds like you've barely learned hiragana and katakana. At that point, you just need practice. It also sounds like you're trying to use your knowledge of Chinese characters to bypass the Japanese language. Don't do that. You'll hit a wall if you just try to guess the meaning of words based on extrapolating from the Chinese fragments. You have to learn the Japanese words, including pronunciation. Listen to the voices as you read. Learning how words are spelled (with kanji) actually comes second. Use a text hooker to speed up your dictionary lookups. With practice, you'll be able to look words up nearly as fast as they're spoken. Don't use Google Translate. If you have to use a machine translator, use ATLAS, but try to avoid it. You can't skip learning grammar. Without a basic grasp of grammar you won't be able to get anywhere.

Even if the intent to do harm is clear by intuition, it'd be fairly easy to cast sufficient doubt on "malicious intent" in a court of law to escape a criminal conviction. All the accused would have to do is suggest that there was no clear, foreseeable connection between his action and the outcome. In other words, he could (likely successfully) claim that he didn't know that the target was epileptic, or that such images had a significant likelihood to cause physical harm to others.

Well, the text of the image was "You deserve a seizure for your posts". And in many cases, these images are targeted at known epileptics. I have a family member who's had life-threatening epileptic attacks, so this isn't a laughing matter to me. Even if intent can't be proven, reckless endangerment of others is still punishable by law. If it results in death, we call it "manslaughter".

BBC: Trolls try to trigger seizures - is it assault? An American journalist was sent a tweet intended to cause an epileptic seizure, and a seizure occurred. Now he intends to press charges for assault in court. Such a case would explore poorly-charted territory in case law: seeking civil or even criminal liability for intentional use of digital information to cause physical harm. Fuwanovel is no stranger to trolls or flashing GIFs, so the topic seems particularly relevant here.

I'm not sure why, but I expected a SIM aspect to along with the theme--gameplay centering on successfully managing the business while raising heroine stats, researching new recipes, etc. Maybe it's because of my experience with the similar-themed Softhouse Chara game, Akuma Musume no Kanban Ryouri. Do you have dialogue choices pertaining to business decisions? Or does every choice simply pertain to one of the heroines?

I'm waiting for the worthwhile games to get ported to Steam.

I'm surprised this went anywhere. It's your word against 4 others. If there weren't any witnesses, all they had to do was not talk and nothing could be done. In any case, court requires evidence. Do you have any? People like this are dangerous. If they're not locked away for a while, they might try to come after you again. Unfortunately, minors tend to get away with violent offenses that don't result in serious harm, especially against their peers. The school can only do so much, even if they're on your side. A month or so in jail, imprisoned amongst strangers, would probably be enough for them to seriously regret assaulting someone--at least, if they're not already hardened criminals.

Probably something like this.

There's a number of strange ideas in the OP. Let me point out the ones that caught my eye. This is just your perspective. Another perspective is that VNs are very much a genre of wish-fulfillment games for lonely men in their late teens and early 20's, focused on a cast of attractive female companions (inevitably high schoolers) to choose for the male protagonist to date and ultimately have sex with. Both perspectives are valid. Both perspectives oversimplify. As I see it, the otome genre is just the converse of the much more common bishoujo genre: games focused on a cast of attractive males rather than attractive females, made for females rather than males. They tend to be on mobile devices because that's where the female "gamers" are. Young adult romantic fiction has been targeted at females for a long time now, so it's no real surprise that otome games would catch on. The market was already there, waiting to be tapped. Are we living in the same world? Macs are generally more expensive for the equivalent hardware. There's even a term for it: the Apple tax. People pay more for the premium branding, which commands respect due to the ease of use and excellent service plans. And why would you need expensive hardware to play 2D VNs anyway?

I need to say something about people expecting inferior gameplay in eroge. The H-scenes can actually be disabled in the configuration screen. Want a non-ero game? You got it. I keep telling people the gameplay in these games is good. But until the games get an English release, they'll just have to take our word for it.

Sounds like the machine translator broke. Try selecting a different machine translator in the options maybe? Otherwise, try ITHVNR + Translation Aggregator (what I use) in tandem with ATLAS, or ChiiTrans.

I agree that a basic search capability would be useful for those who like the presentation. We do have to keep in mind that it isn't intended to replace VNDB--it's intended to be a monthly release list, not a game database--so the search capabilities, if implemented, would likely be limited unless the scope of the project were expanded.

The beauty of this site is that it's mostly automated. Maintaining it doesn't appear to be much work at all. It was actually launched in June 2016 and has already been chronicling releases for a while now, until I happened to discover and highlight it to others. The added value is the casual-friendly simplicity of presentation and the automated aggregation from several sources (including EGS links that will actually work for those outside Japan, once implemented). It doesn't replace VNDB or Hau Omochikaeri. It supplements them.