Tayutama 2 -You're the Only One- on Steam

[Narcosis]

SO IT BEGINS

[Nosebleed]

7 hours ago, Veshurik said:

So... Yeah. 

I'm gonna guess this is just a generic reply and what they mean is more along the lines of "we'd like to one day be able to release an English version".

But hey at least they said they wanted one, so that's already a start.

[Decay]

I believe Steam Greenlight requires you to have an english description, otherwise Valve will remove it.

[Nandemonai]

Yeah, don't read too much into it.  If this release isn't by the original Japanese developers, they probably only have limited rights.  These sorts of thing are commonly split up either by geographic region or by language.  Since they put it on Steam, they seem to have worldwide rights; but I wouldn't be surprised if they don't have English language rights.

Also notice the wording.  They explicitly deny that they're confirming anything, and then it says they "would like to" release an English version as well.  Not that they're "working on it", but that they'd like to.  Now, what does that mean?  A whole lot of 'not much'; nitpicking wording like that is always iffy, and even more so when the people in question probably don't speak English very well.  But it's still something.

Edited December 5, 2016 by Nandemonai

[Decay]

Their earlier statement was that they were planning on releasing an English version ASAP. It very much sounded like they had the rights and it was something they planned on doing. They may have exclusive localization rights. My guess is that they actually started talking with some localization companies and realized it may not be as simple as they expected and changed their message a little as a result. Or they actually struck a deal with someone and are now forced to be vague due to not wanting to spill the beans.

Edited December 5, 2016 by Decay

[Veshurik]

So... About prequel. 

[Nandemonai]

11 hours ago, Decay said:

Their earlier statement was that they were planning on releasing an English version ASAP. It very much sounded like they had the rights and it was something they planned on doing. They may have exclusive localization rights. My guess is that they actually started talking with some localization companies and realized it may not be as simple as they expected and changed their message a little as a result. Or they actually struck a deal with someone and are now forced to be vague due to not wanting to spill the beans.

Oh.  Then nevermind

[Lonely]

English release confirmed on Steam this summer.

The official name - "Smart Elves 2 -You're the Only One-". English site is here.

Oh my... It sounds strange, because... Ah, okay.

[Decay]

It sounds strange because it's being translated by a Chinese company who doesn't actually understand English.

[Darklord Rooke]

7 minutes ago, Decay said:

It sounds strange because it's being translated by a Chinese company who doesn't actually understand English.

That might explain the state of the English site xD

[RikiSanic]

I had a fun(?) time reading through the English website they launched. Luckily, I'm not interested in this particular title, but for anyone who is, well, I can't see the final product being anything worth paying for if the translation quality is anywhere near that of the website.

If Lump of Sugar is interested in releasing their titles in English then maybe next time they should partner with a publisher that has a bit more familiarity with the language they're translating to. Until then, I guess English-speaking fans will have to look forward to more "Smart Elves" in the future.

Edited February 25, 2017 by RikiSanic

[Nosebleed]

ಠ_ಠ

[Yuuko]

This happens when you beg for a translation.

[EdwardWongHPTIV]

Yeah... I have yet to see a VN on steam w/o English actually make good on promises of providing them later. For that matter I don't think valve gives two shits about the borderline fraud some companies have committed either. If I had to make a guess they probably only do something if a title gets flagged by a certain number of buyers and the VNs themselves probably don't have enough total sales to meet the threshold. I'm not exaggerating or bitter at all.

[XReaper]

30 minutes ago, Kiriririri said:

This happens when you beg for a translation.

*already dearly regrets having left the warm & comfy sanatorium just earlier this day. at least its productpage seems to read a little amusing/funny, i guess, well.... nevermind

[Dergonu]

Let's hope this was like the Love Sweets thing where someone else, not the translators, actually made the posts. (The chances are really small, but hey. Let's pray desu.)

[Baldur]

12 minutes ago, Dergonu said:

Let's hope this was like the Love Sweets thing where someone else, not the translators, actually made the posts. (The chances are really small, but hey. Let's pray desu.)

They actually hired the chinese company who had already localized the game. So we have a chinese company "translating" a japanese game from chinese into english.

And I also think they're going for a machine tl, rather than just a bad one...

Edited February 25, 2017 by Baldur

[Decay]

11 hours ago, EdwardWongHPTIV said:

Yeah... I have yet to see a VN on steam w/o English actually make good on promises of providing them later. For that matter I don't think valve gives two shits about the borderline fraud some companies have committed either. If I had to make a guess they probably only do something if a title gets flagged by a certain number of buyers and the VNs themselves probably don't have enough total sales to meet the threshold. I'm not exaggerating or bitter at all.

If by "borderline fraud," you mean "selling a product of poor quality," then that is not against Steam's publishing terms. Valve won't take action against anyone just because the quality of their game is poor, unless it actually doesn't work as advertised, and even then the times they step in are extremely far and few between. A game simply having a poor translation would be allowed to stay on Steam no matter how many people report it.

[EdwardWongHPTIV]

@Decay - Well, no, I was talking about games that have no English translation at all. So it can't really be called poor when it doesn't have it to begin with. I was mainly alluding to unfulfilled promises on product pages. Though anyone trusting such things probably deserve to lose their money. Another issue is that sellers can alter the content of their page without any sort history of the changes much less a timestamp on when it was last altered. But then that's par for the coarse for e-commerce in general I suppose. But the point is that it makes it harder for a consumer to dispute. Though tbh certain OELVN developers have a pretty bad track record of overcommitting and underperforming.

Well at least steam doesn't have the problem Amazon does with their 3rd party market. Product page discrepancies are especially rampant when it comes to certain computer parts/electronics. I've seen pages with multiple product numbers and descriptions. Becomes a mystery what you're actually buying.

[Decay]

8 minutes ago, EdwardWongHPTIV said:

@Decay - Well, no, I was talking about games that have no English translation at all. So it can't really be called poor when it doesn't have it to begin with. I was mainly alluding to unfulfilled promises on product pages. Though anyone trusting such things probably deserve to lose their money. Another issue is that sellers can alter the content of their page without any sort history of the changes much less a timestamp on when it was last altered. But then that's par for the coarse for e-commerce in general I suppose. But the point is that it makes it harder for a consumer to dispute. Though tbh certain OELVN developers have a pretty bad track record of overcommitting and underperforming.

Well at least steam doesn't have the problem Amazon does with their 3rd party market. Product page discrepancies are especially rampant when it comes to certain computer parts/electronics. I've seen pages with multiple product numbers and descriptions. Becomes a mystery what you're actually buying.

How many games promise an english version without providing one? Keep in mind that you're allowed to have games that aren't in English on Steam, yet bizarrely, it's Steam policy that all games must have an English description. So if you're releasing a foreign-language-only game on Steam, it still must have an English description. It's pretty clear when they don't have English versions, though.

[EdwardWongHPTIV]

There have been some chinese releases that will have notes claiming an english translation is in the works at launch. Only to have that claim disappear at some point in the following days. Kinda hard to point out examples except for maybe a way back machine but I'm too lazy to look for an example.

At any rate I'm well aware that it easy to see what games currently don't have english support. That warning is pretty hard to miss. Now if Steam would actually filter out anything not in your primary language from it's suggestions. Well steams suggestions are a joke to begin with.

[Nandemonai]

12 hours ago, EdwardWongHPTIV said:

There have been some chinese releases that will have notes claiming an english translation is in the works at launch. Only to have that claim disappear at some point in the following days. Kinda hard to point out examples except for maybe a way back machine but I'm too lazy to look for an example.

That's still not going to be enough to support a claim of fraud.  There are two defenses such a company will deploy, and they will be very difficult to overcome:

1) We were honestly planning on it, but the plans fell through.  We're very sorry and we removed the claim promptly.

2) It was a mistake, it never should have been there, we removed it right away once we realized it was there.

[EdwardWongHPTIV]

Seriously? I said borderline. As in it was approaching that line but not overstepping it. If it was a case of say.. KS stretch goals not being honored on a VN you were looking forward to you would probably have a different opinion. At the end of the day I just ignore chinese VN's and OELVNs. Which isn't exactly fair considering it's just a few bad apples, but honestly I have too much of a back log as it is. Don't really feel like I'm missing out on anything.

[Narcosis]

Are they for real, haha.

[Darklord Rooke]

Posting below image because it deserves to be reposted across forums.

And also time and space, but that's a bit more difficult: