Unless the JAST staff frequently visits the board, I doubt the threat of mass-arguing is going to deter them in the first place, especially considering the fact that they can simply delete/lock all the threads if things get too chaotic.
A better reason for them to not do it is that fans from other online communities/boards will have a tarnished view of the company and that they won’t trust them as much in their future releases–I mean, look at the all the pissed-off comments in the Family Project article in Sankaku Complex, as well as the worried comments in the Demonbane article posted earlier. Well, that’s assuming that they acknowledge the fact that their audience is made up of more than just fanboys that kiss their feet for any non-sex romp title they release.
You have to know to care. I doubt most customers regularly read message boards such as this, or even anime-specific blogs like Sankaku Complex–and even if they do, they don’t pay enough attention to know such game-specific details. What’s common knowledge to a fan is esoteric trivia to a more casual player.
While I was joking, it still is like how B173 M3 says. True, not everyone will hear when JAST censors a game, but most of the fans that buy their games will find out, considering that eroge outside of Japan is already a niche genre. Even if this board gets moderated, it doesn’t mean that it won’t annoy those that have to see the trolls. Censorship will always hurt a company like JAST, regardless of how many fans do still purchase their products.
Hmm… You know, now that I think about it, it is true that fans do have to know in order to care and you’re also correct in that the casual fans generally don’t visit the forums. It sort of begs the question–Why the hell did they announce the apology/refunds for KK in just the forums if the only ones that frequent it are only the “hardcore” fans? Why did it have to take Sankaku Complex for the news to spread out to more people? Shouldn’t they have also put it on the front page of Jlist/PP/GCollections/JAST sites instead of just the JAST forums, like with most formal apologies? I mean, it was a huge piece of news, and it’s not that hard to imagine that even some “casual” fans would like to know about it, so why wasn’t it announced where everyone, not just the hardcore customers, would notice? Everyone has the right to know, even if some happen to be the more “casual” fans.
That kind of puts their integrity into futher question if you ask me, as it could be seen as an attempt to get away with as little people finding out about it as possible while still giving impression of “coming clean” to those who do know. Even if more people will find out eventually, I’d say it’d probably would have been lot more ethical if they actually took the incentive to put it on their front pages themselves just in case if people missed the forums. So with that in mind, is there any specific reason why we shouldn’t worry about whether they’ll keep this game uncensored or keep their promise again if there isn’t even a hint of assurance to be found with regards to this particular game? The fact that there is no tag disclosing the status of its content just seems like a way of giving room for them to say “we didn’t tell you we weren’t censoring it”, while still retaining sales from those who weren’t careful enough to notice in case if they were to censor the content. That doesn’t bode well for me, as it indicates the possibility of a lack of confidence in their own product, and it also happens to be a dick move to those they promised to tell if they actually do end up censoring this game.
Besides, I’m assuming they actually looked over the content before they licensed it, remember? As far as I’m concerned, they should have already decided that they can keep this game uncensored before they licensed it, so the absence of a “fully uncensored” label raises a [color=#FF0000]red flag[/color] that needs to be kept under scrutiny.
