But this is a real problem. The real problem, if you ask me. It’s a vicious cycle. I believe a market could have been built for these games. As things like Persona 3, and Disgaea, have demonstrated, there is a market willing to go for this sort of thing. They’re just stuck in the same ghetto that RPGs were. Except far worse, because RPGs were still being brought over in the bad old days; just not very many, and often-questionable ones at that. But with these games, very little ever makes it anywhere, so it’s hard even to prove by counterexample that “Hey, this thing sold well!”.
The pirate sites exist because people want these things, yet they cannot get them legitimately. This is the same reason fansubbing exists, but the hgame scene never had anything remotely like the old fansub ethic (which in any case is all but dead). Nobody is going to pick up … let’s say … Akazukin Chacha. It’s just never going to happen. The handful of other really-old nobody-will-ever-license-this shows that DID get licensed, bombed. Since people want it, but it isn’t being provided, they simply said “fine, we’ll take it”. (Yes, I’m aware of the large armies of people who raise the Jolly Roger at the drop of a pin. They exist no matter what you do, but the effect I’m describing only applies to unlicensed material.)
Unfortunately the effect of this is that if someone DID pick up Cha Cha, people “already have it” and don’t buy the actual release. (I actually was in an eroge panel at a con once, where the presenter (!) used a pirate copy of TCI for his demo. When I called him on it, those were his exact words.) This undermines and can even destroy the potential to sell Cha Cha. Similarly hgames have an avalanche of piracy because there was no legitimate market to speak of, so the pirates captured all the mindshare by default. Now you have to dig thru almost to the bottom of the first page of search results before MinDead Blood takes you to the maker’s homepage. Hell, even a thread on this board comes up halfway down! The legitimate homepage is several entries below Narg talking about their products!
Once you get into this trap, it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle of doom, where getting written off prompts the behavior that prompts getting written off. It also doesn’t help that the handful of times companies tried to “test the waters” of a dating-sim type product, they put out steaming-pile shovelware (because it was cheap) and then when it failed, concluded there wasn’t any money there.
I’m convinced piracy (in general) will only be defeated once you can get anything by going to a central online database that is totally comprehensive. (Yes, I do mean exactly that: anything ever commercially released by anyone.) iTunes proved that this model works. Google has already gone a long way with the book settlement – they will eventually have every book anyone ever wrote that has not been lost. There literally is no other way to trump the dodgy sources. Until the pirate networks are worse at having what you want than the legit networks, we will never win. But I’m not even sure this would help for eroge, because that would create controversies similar to the RapeLay nonsense when it was discovered that games in the import section were frequently explicit.
(This would require a change in copyright law, effectively creating a sort of compulsory license similar to the ones already in place for covering a song. Administering this will be an absolute nightmare, especially for imported works. Orphaned works are another big problem.)
:lol: