QuQu: Watching Visual Novels and the Failings of Sekai Project

[Darklord Rooke]

 I have watched the first minute of this video, and I have the following comments:

Quote

Games based on prose, their popularity has waned somewhat over time:

Interactive fiction, otherwise known as ‘games based on prose’ is in the middle of a resurgence. Led by games such as ‘Gamebook Adventures’ and ’80 days’, for a time their popularity was so high that interactive fiction was declared the 'future of books.'

Sure, games focused on prose no longer make up the majority of the market, not because they’ve ‘waned’ when compared with the audience in the 80s, but rather because the gaming industry is so much larger encompassing many different types of consumers. I would say there’s more future in interactive fiction games in the West than visual novels, because the audience is there but there’s far less cost involved.

He says games have been focusing on graphical quality, that has been true in the past. However, the recent trend is including much more story in video games in general, like in Mass Effect or Telltale Games. They're not in written format, but still it shows the modern trend of story oriented games. Basically the quest for graphics has a surge at the beginning of a console cycle, but with ports such a big thing these days, it settles down and graphics don't advance noticeably for years. In fact, it was noted in the PS3 and 360 generation that people hadn't had to upgrade their PCs as much for quite some time, which was either a bad or good thing depending on your viewpoint. Graphical quality has taken another quick leap forward now the PS4 and XBOX One has been released ... I now need more than 4gigs of RAM. Boo!

[Visual Novels] the medium has gained a significant increase in recent times

Do you see what the guy did here? He showed a graph with interest levels beginning from basically ZERO and shows interest in the year 2016 where interest is not ZERO, concluding there’s a significant increase. Well yeah, of course there is. Pretty easy for there to be a 'significant increase in interest' when before there was 'no interest'. All you have to do is show that suddenly there 'is an interest' and BAM, significant increase.

While not ‘incorrect’ it’s merely an example of how easy it is to spread misinformation with statistics. In other words, the statistics don’t show what he’s trying to show, so there's some fudging of the language here..

Other mediums are starting to grow stale – literature and comic books

Firstly, literature isn’t a medium. Secondly the medium of ‘books’ isn’t suffering a decrease. There’s much talk of a decrease in the percentage of overall book readers, but this is offset by general population increases. Literature sells little because of boring subject matter, yet romance and science fiction/fantasy are continuing to do very well. SF and fantasy have boomed after decades of it being 'shunned', and paranormal fiction and YA fiction are booming.

In 2013, comic book publishers were boasting month after month of sale increases and massive sales. Hardly the result of an industry going stale. He made some comment about fans falling off the hypetrain, which is a little weird imagery, but I don't see evidence of this. Fans aren't going away from books and comic books. Neither are they going away from video games.

Which is all beside the point considering the book medium, and the comic book medium still dwarfs the visual novel medium. And no, Visual Novels haven’t eaten into their sales. So no clue what he’s getting at.

as well as other Japanese entertainment in general has been on the rise in the US

This coming a few years after the massive manga crash we had in the West, where many manga publishers went out of business. Is anime in the US really on the rise? Are you sure? Is he sure? I'd very much like to see some figures for this. 

There's some dispute here anyway. One side will site figures showing decline in physical sale of anime, the other side sites the rebuttal that distribution methods have changed. From what I can see, there isn't a very clear cut position here.

So that's my commentary of the first minute in this video. It's full of unclear and dubious assertions which he then extrapolates on to produce murky conclusions based on murky reasoning and little facts. My question? Is the rest of this video even worth watching?

[Zakamutt]

no

it's pretty shit

[Nosebleed]

This video and others like it are the reason I am not subscribed to any youtuber that focuses on otaku media.

[Eclipsed]

Should sign into your Youtube Account and post dem commentaries in that vid's comments

 

Then comment on the rest of the 20 minutes as well

[Darklord Rooke]

2 minutes ago, Eclipsed said:

Should sign into your Youtube Account and post dem commentaries in that vid's comments

Tempting, but I don't do Youtube comments  Do I even have an account? I can't remember, but I don't think so.

[Deep Blue]

He is giving out useful advice like if you want to read a Japanese untranslated VNs why don't you pay someone to translate it for you and cut the out the middle man aka SP, mangagamer, JAST, etc....  or learn japanese to translate it yourself.... what?  
He also trivialize what S.R.L. did with their vn (he doesn't talk about the whole scam about the voice acting either) and blames SP for pulling the game from steam....  and I can go on and on but in general it's just a waste of time.

I'm really critical against SP (yep it's really obvious at this point) but this guy doesn't make any sense, though his complains about some delays are understandable, that's the only thing I can agree with him at a certain level.

[Darklord Rooke]

8 minutes ago, Deep Blue said:

I'm really critical against SP (yep it's really obvious at this point) but this guy doesn't make any sense, though his complains about some delays are understandable, that's the only thing I can agree with him at a certain level.

I have nothing against the guy, and I don’t really care if people criticise SP for incompetence. Just ... so much misinformation. Being someone who's invested and interested in the Western mediums, I can tell instantly when someone is fudging stuff.

For example, Choice of Games is a company which regularly puts out text only interactive fiction. They regularly sell their games for thousands of copies, some sell more than 20,000 copies, some free ones have over 50,000 downloads. I'm kinda tempted to write something for them, for fun (on the whole though they seem to promote more choices in their text than I'm comfortable with. More choices means more superficial consequences for those choices.)

The implication that Visual Novels are a big part of this resurgence of prose based games because Japanese have ‘no hang ups’ while the West is focused on graphics is ignorant.

Deep breaths, Rooke, deeeeep breaths.

[Clephas]

Typical idealist who spouts his cloudy internal dogma without paying attention to past examples... such as Darkness Translations and Sanity Ends.

[Dergonu]

I agree with Deep Blue, I'm critical to some of the stuff SP does as well, but ... this was just silly

22 minutes ago, Deep Blue said:

He is giving out useful advice like if you want to read a Japanese untranslated VNs why don't you pay someone to translate it for you and cut the out the middle man aka SP, mangagamer, JAST, etc....  or

Kek

[Black Sands Entertainment]

Fucking amazing. Fuwanovel community is soooooooooooo forgiving and compassionate compared to the Reddit community.

They are praising this man right now in the subreddit yet in fuwanovel, he is being crucified.

 

Thank god I chose my allies well. Fuwa, the place where people look over the tiniest slights. Reddit, the place where all good ideas go to die.

[Narcosis]

What's truly depressing, is the fact thousands of otaku will base their new knowledge off videos like these.

Ignorance is bliss.

[Zakamutt]

Well, this doesn't exactly look like massive praise to me... https://www.reddit.com/r/visualnovels/comments/4nx4bf/ququs_watching_visual_novels_and_the_failures_of/

That said, there are other subreddits it might be posted in... that I don't care about, lol.

[iamnoob]

A-san : "Also, the idea of commissioning someone to translate a VN for your own personal use? Yeah, sure, we all have fluent Japanese-speaking coder friends with the time to do that, right? "

B-san: "They're not hard to find with a quick Google search."

 

[sanahtlig]

Confirmed: This entire video is a rant about Sekai Project's crowdfunding misadventures.  I'm not sure why this needed a 20-minute video.

Also, Sekai Project is hardly the only English eroge publisher that has mishandled releases.  All 3 major publishers have a history of mismanaging various aspects of their business.  Calling any of them professional operations would be a bit of a stretch.

[Narcosis]

23 minutes ago, sanahtlig said:

Also, Sekai Project is hardly the only English eroge publisher that has mishandled releases.  All 3 major publishers have a history of mismanaging various aspects of their business.  Calling any of them professional operations would be a bit of a stretch.

Mangagamer is propably the closest call to being professional, in one way or another. Can't say that much about the rest and Jast... well, if they would release games more often, who knows? I guess they just like to play it safe.

[sanahtlig]

7 minutes ago, Narcosis said:

Mangagamer is propably the closest call to being professional, in one way or another. Can't say that much about the rest and Jast... well, if they would release games more often, who knows? I guess they just like to play it safe.

MangaGamer is the same company that leaked their customer database (including real names and e-mail addresses, if I remember correctly) to a crazed anti-pedophilia activist.

[Narcosis]

9 minutes ago, sanahtlig said:

MangaGamer is the same company that leaked their customer database (including real names and e-mail addresses, if I remember correctly) to a crazed anti-pedophilia activist.

The bar's set very low nowadays, otherwise they wouldn't even exist anymore.

[john 'mr. customer' smith]

I get so angry about trains from Railway company x sometimes.

They get delayed so often it's not even funny. You know what's worse? They even have the audacity to let other trains depart even before my delayed train arrives! It's pathetically obvious that they are a shamelessly disorganized company, and they deserve to be wiped out in a sudden magical outburst of socio-economic justice.

Really, I despise other people sometimes, being so ignorant of all this, giving them all that money they don't deserve a cent of, just living their ignorant lives. The fools. If you want to get places, just get a car, duh

Trust me, I understand these things.

 

Spoiler

This is pretty much what all the sekai-hate feels like to me, please don't take this metaphor too serious

 

[sanahtlig]

1 hour ago, john 'mr. customer' smith said:

I get so angry about trains from Railway company x sometimes.

I approve of your elaborate metaphor for Sekai Project's questionable handling of Maitetsu.

[Kawasumi]

3 hours ago, sanahtlig said:

MangaGamer is the same company that leaked their customer database (including real names and e-mail addresses, if I remember correctly) to a crazed anti-pedophilia activist.

source?

[Zakamutt]

They didn't leak it as much as their data was breached through some vulnerability https://www.reddit.com/r/visualnovels/comments/2etexi/psa_mangagamer_database_compromised_if_you_have_a/.

[solidbatman]

This guy simply wants to be the VN version of PartialToast i mean TotalBiscuit 

[Xavier12]

Mangagamer is also the company that wanted to boost their sales by only making the Koihime voices available after a certain number of sales, which then took over a year.

 

[Scorp]

12 hours ago, iamnoob said:

A-san : "Also, the idea of commissioning someone to translate a VN for your own personal use? Yeah, sure, we all have fluent Japanese-speaking coder friends with the time to do that, right? "

B-san: "They're not hard to find with a quick Google search."

But this is true. If you have money, you can commision almost anyone of your choice to translate any sort of ridiculous stuff. koestl, conjueror, arunaru, gare, aroduc, maria - everyone is freelance, so if you can pay them - you will get your translation. Alas I think it would be MUCH cheaper to learn japanese instead.

 

[wyldstrykr]

 

19 minutes ago, Scorp said:

But this is true. If you have money, you can commision almost anyone of your choice to translate any sort of ridiculous stuff. koestl, conjueror, arunaru, gare, aroduc, maria - everyone is freelance, so if you can pay them - you will get your translation. Alas I think it would be MUCH cheaper to learn japanese instead.

 

its like time vs money, if you have time learn japanese, if you have money, pay them