sanahtlig

That seems dangerously close to airhead heroine though, and those are terrible.

I oppose any government efforts to step up enforcement of pornography laws until they can figure out the difference between fiction and reality.

I'm going to speculate wildly and say that Dovac isn't firing the people he desperately needs. Would he really fire a PR guy in this moment of need? No, more than likely it's the reverse (or neither). How would you feel if your boss was undermining you at every turn?

I'm beginning to wonder if Sekai Project might be falling apart at the seams. This isn't the first person in the last week or so to say they're leaving Sekai Project.

I scoured the video for mention of Maitetsu and Baldr Sky and I vaguely remember that bit as well. It simply confirmed my existing view of Sekai Project so I didn't think much of it at the time.

It's the standard company line whenever a non-adult release of an eroge is announced. "We'll consider an adult release depending on how the Kickstarter / Steam release goes". Debonosu said something similar.

To reiterate yet again, the problem is the perceived inequity resulting from different audiences being treated differently. One group's discount is another group's tax. It doesn't matter whether you call it a "discount" for group 1 or a "tax" for group 2--it's both! The essential question here is whether the price differences are based in costs or whether the company is simply exploiting group 2's willingness to pay more for content than group 1. The problem is exacerbated if group 2 feels coerced to pay the higher price because the company says that if the version targeted at them doesn't sell, they'll be ignored in the future. The problem is further exacerbated if group 2 feels that it is a minority and its voice is being dismissed. It's not just this title. This is a pattern among Sekai Project releases, and to a lesser extent among English releases of Japanese eroge in general. To put it another way: imagine there is a single gas station in your town. The next nearest gas station is 20 miles away in a nearby city. Energy prices fall, but your town gas station refuses to lower the price, and says if you don't like it then go buy somewhere else. When you complain, the gas station owner (who also owns the city gas station) threatens to close and asks you how you'd like that. The city dwellers then mock you for being backwater rural troglodytes and tell you to go buy an electric car if you care so much.

I'd suggest not challenging @Rooke to an RPG trivia challenge. It's like an unarmed child challenging a black-belt in karate wielding a machine gun. Even if you somehow manage to get close enough before he sprays you with bullets, he'll still pound you into the ground like a little girl.

/r/visualnovels, in their great wisdom, have direct-linked to a warez site on the front page (rather than linking somewhere more reasonable... I wonder where?). But putting this befuddling decision aside, Frontwing itself has stepped into the ring to comment.

I think 6k yen and 8.8k yen are pretty standard for full-length titles.

Best joke of the day. ... ...oh wait, you were serious.

I wouldn't be complaining if I were convinced this was the case both in this game, and in general.

Using a real person's face (your own?) for an avatar is perceived as odd in this community. Just an FYI. Most people here value anonymity, especially due to the association of visual novels with adult content.

Check the "English original" tab on my censored eroge list.

Breadth of appeal (the number of potential customers), for one. The more customers you can defray the costs of production over, the lower the price you can charge. Conversely, niche content demands a premium, and in this case that principle is being applied to gouge adult gamers. I don't like that. I accept it when adult customers are bearing the full brunt of production costs. But when 10k Steam customers are buying the non-adult version, they're subsidizing the production costs too. The 1k adult customers no longer need to pay such high prices just to make the games worth developing / releasing in English. Eroge companies shouldn't get to have their cake and eat it too. That's not fair to their most devoted customers. The growing popularity of Steam as a marketplace for VNs should be leveraged to benefit everyone, and not just the bottomlines of eroge developers and publishers. Western indie devs get it. Japanese companies and their English partners don't.

@TiagofvarelaThat's the relevant quote. Restricting this to tethering the adult and non-adult version prices individually for each title mitigates the undesirable anti-market effects, in my opinion.

I disagree, for exactly the reasons @Rooke pointed out in his argument against me earlier. The basis for comparison should be the price of the cut version, not other games or discrete "content chunks" of an arbitrary game. This allows the flexible relative pricing structure that digital content with front-loaded development costs and near-zero distribution costs demands.

This isn't a binary yes/no question. It's a sliding scale. The closer to "fair" the pricing seems, the fewer people will be turned away because they feel they're being gouged. I wasn't happy with MangaGamer's pricing scheme either. In fact, I complained to JAST USA and MangaGamer about it also. (You can read Peter Payne's response at that link as well). JAST gets around the problem by releasing on Steam later, so that early adopters of the adult versions pay a premium for "early access", which is an acceptable compromise and consistent with consumer expectations.

I've made this point before, but what Sekai Project is trying to accomplish here is product differentiation. They want to move high volume of product to Steam gamers who are very price sensitive, and maximize revenue per sale from core fans and adult gamers who are less sensitive to price. They want the best of both worlds. This makes sense purely from a business min-maxing perspective, but ignores consumer expectations. Consumers expect that pricing will be fair: that they'll be charged proportionately to the content they're getting. This issue becomes particularly acute when extra content is considered non-optional or a key reason they're buying the game. For adult gaming fans, the adult content often qualifies as such. Funding such campaigns is risky, if only because backers often don't know how good the game will be. English reviews are in short supply for non-English games, and in cases like this the game wasn't even out in Japan so backers had no information on the final product at all. In return for the discount, you agree to assume that risk.

Edit: Sorry, forgot to update the page.

I thought the blog post was a good read, and gives some insight into his thought processes. I think he had good intentions and is simply misunderstood. He still needs to remove the Neko Para Vol. 2 patch though. ... my sympathy for him has nothing at all to do with him promoting my blog.

I'm pretty sure Denpasoft was created because Frontwing didn't want their Kickstarter / Grisaia release on Steam associated with a porn company (at the time). Dovac/Herkz/someone else involved commented on the matter at one point. Your own paranoid tendencies influence your theory of mind, I think. Other people don't necessarily think like you.

Touche. This is a rather unique circumstance since even the 18+ package release will be dual language. Ok. Sure, I'll buy that there's some difference in number of accounts capable of purchasing adult titles from the new publishers. The audiences for Sekai Project and MangaGamer are entirely different. Their attitudes towards adult material are different. Their lineup of titles is entirely different. Their marketing is entirely different. There's many, many factors at play here. Singling out any one isn't going to close the gap. In order to make the adult side of their business a success, Sekai Project basically needs to reinvent their entire strategy from the ground up. They need to, essentially, become a MangaGamer or Nutaku. Such a radical change would require a far greater investment of resources than they're prepared to sink into it. More likely is that Sekai Project will simply exit the adult market because it's not worth the effort for a simple side business, fans be damned.

Also, I can say from experience that trying to affiliate market games from MangaGamer's store is a fool's errand. It's doubtful he's making any significant amounts of money from it, and on top of that you have to make a huge amount to even be able to withdraw it. The general consensus is that their affiliate program is broken. People after money don't affiliate market the MangaGamer store. It just isn't worth it.

It actually does make sense, just not by conventional standards. Suppose the following is always true: You buy the English version to support the translation of the game and have it on Steam. You buy the Japanese version to support the creation of the game. You want the full content of the Japanese adult release in English. In order to fulfill all conditions with 2 purchases, you have to buy the Japanese version and the Steam version and then use a patch to restore the adult content to the Steam version. Buying the patch would constitute a 3rd purchase. I don't think it justifies hosting warez, but I see his logic.