I meant a jast or mangagamer expansion not product growth. Hire more people to get the jobs done and so that either a few more can be worked on at once or so that they can get games out with good quality at a faster pace.
someone that gets good h-games not games very very have heard of
I have to disagree here. While the Rapelay scare has certainly added an additional obstacle, the real reason eroge are staying in Japan is that most eroge companies aren’t interested in the overseas market. And why should they be? H-game localization has been going on for 15 years now, and the market is still tiny. Most of the companies that tried are now dead. Only JAST has managed to stick it out–and you could argue that’s because they had their fingers in other pots. Mangagamer just started and financially they don’t seem to be in that good of shape. Sure, there’s a large potential market, but it’s being bled dry by piracy. I’d venture that the majority of eroge players first encounter the genre through piracy, and therefore will likely continue pirating the games indefinitely. The few that choose to support the market form a niche base that’s barely able to sustain the small industry that has arisen. This base likely buys games regardless of quality, such that the difference in sales between “good” games and “bad” games isn’t even all that large.
Looking at the market from this perspective, it’s no surprise the big names aren’t showing any interest–from a risk/rewards vantage point, there’s not much for them to gain by taking a risk on the English market. Why bother wasting resources that could be better spent making new games for a proven market?
I’m pretty sure that’s why they’ve stayed afloat. If b-games were their only product, they probably would have gone under during the period before they acquired the GC catalog: the number of back-catalog titles they had wasn’t very high, and at the same time, they went close to a year between releases a few times. That’s a recipie for skating the line on running out of money.
(Now, though, they have a lot of back-catalog titles that have remained in print for years; sure, sales of the back-catalog are probably lower than new titles, but they never really stop selling.)
Not to mention the lower prices foreign markets will bear. Not only do they sell fewer units of the overseas products, they make less money per unit. It’s quite possible going overboard on the foreign market could actually bankrupt a company, since many of them are fairly small.
I expect that to become the norm.