Correct me if I’m wrong but doesn’t the DMCA only apply to Americans? You technically can’t get sued under those laws anywhere else? I’m guessing the DMCA notice was successful since most servers host sites in America. Furthermore it surprises me the DMCA even applies to productions that are not even available for sale in the West.
I thought that was the legal loophole fansubbers and scanslators have been exploiting for years, the lack of knowledge that there is a huge underground demand for this sort of stuff combined with the fact that it isn’t for sale here. I guess globalization has really led to some major disadvantages since now the eroge genre is becoming more than just a footnote in the western PC gaming scene. The average comp savvy person these days knows what an eroge is so it was only a matter of time before the rapelay fiasco etc brought Japanese attention to the vast amounts of predominantly piracy supplied fans in the west.
I agree that legally they are entirely within their rights to C&D every single fan translator in the west. But it seriously is a dick move if you think about it. I think that there is a type of “determinism” associated with this sort of thing. A lot of game developers these days blame their economic mishaps on piracy and many eroge devs in Japan are concerned that fan translations will encourage piracy. But arguing from this point of view in my opinion is illogical. If the fan translators didn’t exist, no one would’ve been buying that game in significant numbers to begin with. Either way they don’t gain anything and pursuing the matter only incurs further legal fees thus increasing the already cutthroat threats to their profit margins. From my point of view it would make more sense to encourage or at least turn a blind eye to westerners trying to translate these games into their own languages. The fansub community is the reason anime and manga was able to expand all over the world and create international demand for it. I seriously doubt anime would be as big as it is today if it wasn’t for fansubs. The eroge industry is stigmatized as porn by the morally obsessed masses and I see fan translations piggybacking on anime fansub popularity as a good way to provide the right exposure for the right titles which presents itself as a major business opportunity for Japanese companies to get established here. I think the profitability of the eroge industry (what little there is) is because of how accessible it is in Japan compared to the west. You have very limited venues to approach for buying these sorts of games in the west. In Japan I could walk into Akihabara and climb up to the second or third floor of a certain store and find a lot of normal looking people browsing the shelves buying the latest eroge. I bought Majikoi just by asking, no one had any issues with it even though I was foreign. I paid a nice 7000 yen for it and I don’t regret it at all. In the west you wouldn’t be able to do that. That’s why the porn industry in the west is so heavily pirated.
But seriously, lets be honest with ourselves, you cannot expect to argue that piracy and loss of profits is the primary motivation for these C&Ds. If anything it’s vile xenophobia and arrogance on the part of the developers. We can’t argue with the law and we have to bend over and take it, but that doesn’t mean we have to like it. It’s really obvious ensuring good reputation and product quality is the last thing on their minds, they just don’t want dirty gaijin playing their games, the very idea offends them. It’s nice to know at least some people are open minded and care about more than the bottom line or the idea of westerners violating their precious cashcow franchises such as Ryukishi07’s wholehearted encouragement of witch hunt translating Umineko or Nitro+ taking the logical choice of signing on with JAST to get their games translated. But as I was saying about determinism, piracy is no excuse for a failing industry. Recent studies even indicate that claims like “90% of X games are pirated” is actually highly misleading. You cannot guarantee that someone who downloads a game would have bought it. Counting 1million downloads for something doesn’t mean 1 million potential sales that have been lost.
I agree that it’s morally wrong that someone is able to enjoy another person’s hard work without paying for it, but from a business perspective it is intellectually dishonest to blame piracy as a reason profitability is lacking. If JAST ever goes under, piracy won’t be the reason why. If anything it’ll be the fact that they’ve been dealing with a niche genre limited heavily in terms of how it can be distributed by virture of the content itself. You can’t even get some of this shit past Canadian customs. Similarly the PC gaming industry is being abandoned wholesale by companies like Epic games because they think rampant piracy has cut into their profits. The sad truth is poorly optimized PC ports of games that were console oriented by design is the reason profits are dipping for PC. The control scheme, hud, gameplay methods, FOV etc of your typical multi platform game in this decade tends to be entirely designed for console players in mind. 10 years ago you didn’t have things like auto recharging health, oversized huds and inventory systems clearly not designed for keyboards and mice.
The true reason for PC versions of smash hit console games failing is that they simply weren’t built for PCs in mind, they were ported with many of their console oriented features intact and often people who have both a PC and Console end up buying it for the console because it plays better. Piracy is not the reason. Look at Blizzard Entertainment, while unquestionably millions of copies of warcraft, starcraft etc have been pirated, millions more were purchased. You can attribute most of their current profitability to world of warcraft but the primary reason they are successful is they develop their games exclusively for the PC and optimize it for the keyboard and mouse. Most game developers don’t do this, it’s time consuming to develop for PCs and factor in a multitude of hardware and peripheral combinations. By comparison it’s piss easy to develop for consoles and you get far greater returns not because its hard to pirate console games (hint: it’s piss easy and everyone modded their PS2s etc back in the day).
Long story short, piracy no matter how legally or morally objectionable, is not the reason companies go bankrupt. Shitty design, poor marketing and lack of interest in the product is the reason. By C&Ding fan translators instead of utilizing them, cracking down on fansubbers etc you are doing the opposite of marketing. You’re demarketing your product. Legal and moral arguments aside, from a business perspective you’re cutting down your exposure. It’s very illogical and shortsighted not to mention typical of the Japanese to engage in these activities. Many businesses in Japan don’t even operate under the idea of maintaining profitability at any cost instead they run on some nationalist agenda.
If there were 100 million dollars in profit just waiting to be reaped by a company such as Minori in the US if only they simply translated and sold their games abroad, they still wouldn’t do it. It’s not about the money, they are refusing on principle.
Case in point: Wal-Mart failed in Japan because Japanese consumers believed the cheaper products they are selling are lower in quality despite exact same products being sold in other stores for a higher price.
This is the mentality of these people, the money is not the issue here, loyalty, nationalism and xenophobia and misinformation are the driving issues behind the problems in this industry. Legally we can’t challenge it but from a human perspective they are using these laws which protect their creation in all the wrong ways. It’s their personal freedom to act on this and I don’t object to those freedoms. But they’re exercising their freedoms for all the wrong reasons.
