MG probably released those stats to curb the perceptual problem that crops itself up every now and then thanks to guys like me. If you look at the titles they announced for 2013 at AX, it sends all sorts of red flags to me about the state of MG’s financial situation. All of their new titles are (according to them) low risk, low cost, and (relatively) high return. All of them are nukige titles.
To me, it looks like there’s a profitable market to be had for these sex-crazed games-but the minute you increase the intelligence standard of the title, it suddenly becomes a huge risk with low reward. I don’t understand it, are people saying one thing but doing something completely different? Over the past 5 years it seems to me that English consumers of Japanese product (games, VN, anime, or whatever) are mostly talk and little money.
Oh, people don’t always actually want what they say they want. It’s not lying, exactly; people will often truthfully say they want something then when it actually is available, not buy it. Someone who specializes in this area (and they exist) could say more exactly why. But if you go only by what your customers are telling you they want, you can easily be led down the wrong path.
In the particular case of these games, there are some easy explanations for why the nukige do better. It’s easier for people to admit to liking a game with a great story and some sex, than to admit to liking (say) Magical Teacher or whatever it’s called from Score. So story-based game fans are much more likely than, well, porn fans to be active on these boards, etc. People are, yes, also likely to say they like story more than they actually do simply because they feel social pressure from the other story people. (People taking political opinion polls have to be very careful not to imply they’d like to hear one or the other answer, or it skews the results, for the same reason).
And finally, well, sex sells. Sex is a major selling point for these games and an easy way to get people’s attention. So the more sex a game has, the easier it is for word to get out about it, and the more it sells.
I would disagree with that statement somewhat since Mangagamer has said their nukige don’t sell all that well. More like “low cost, low return” titles, i.e., low risk. It makes sense after they’ve had a major title like Kara no Shoujo bust. A few more busts like that and that may be it for them.
Can you link to a recent statement (past year) where MG stated their Nukiges generally don’t sell well?
If that’s true, how do you suppose they stay afloat? Like, if nothing makes money…generally speaking, businesses tend to close shop. MangaGamer’s still here after 4 years.
Besides, the sales data we do have access to doesn’t support that. Their “top 5” consistently has nukige in it. Some of their nukige are obviously doing much more poorly than the rest - Shera My Witch is never ever ever in it, but Harem Party is in it quite a bit and near the top.
The top 5 has actually been fairly consistent for months now: Whatever came out recently, then some mixture of Conquering the Queen; Koihime; Shuffle; and Harem Party. Occasionally some random thing will break into #5 (like today, Hinata Bokko was there for some reason).
I remember reading an article on a porn news site (can’t find the link), with an industry producer stating this very fact. He cited that people always whine that porn has no plot or cheap looking sets. Then mentioned how several attempts at making plot driven, expensive set pornography has been produced, but barely break even at best. “Porn with plot” was the standard during the 1970’s and somewhat in the early 1980’s, but it was just easier to not have plot at all. Thus the standard today. It also occurred to people, that plot porn has less sex because it wastes so much time on plot. Who wants 30 minutes of sex in a 2 hour video, when you can just have 2 hours of pure sex? Very few people it seems. Plus it takes time and money to find actors and actress with actual… well… acting talent who’d film pornography. Cheaper to just find “any random girl” willing to do a fuck for $1500 per scene. Then there’s the whole issue with actor guilds if people started to seriously consider porn had acting in them…
Especially since you can get it for free, with very little effort. Not saying everyone pirates, just that the temptation and risk-to-reward ratio makes it a no brainer to achieve. People want to have everything, but people don’t want to pay for everything. Greed and self entitlement are survival mechanisms after all. True, a hardcore pirate was never going to pay for it in the first place, but casual and newbie pirates don’t have to either. Not unless he or she is REALLY loyal, and evidently, there’s less than 6000 of 'em. I know more than 6000 people have played these games… and one can confirm torrent activity having more than 6000 downloads.
Capitalism 101: it doesn’t matter how many people want or have played a product, it matters how many pay for it.
Eroge are a very unique and strange niche in Japan. That’s one of the reasons why eroge is an interesting medium, is the fact that they do have very complex stories combined with heavily pornographic elements.
But if we’re talking about porn producers in America, then we’re talking live action. The comparable market in Japan is live action porn. How much live action JAV has a complex plot? I think the closest Western analogue to eroge is probably the romance novel, and … well, I don’t actually know hardly anything about it, but I don’t get the impression thre are many authors writing romance novels like Koihime, or Demonbane, or Kara no Shoujo.
There’s a lot of JAV with plot. Not always intricate or insightful plot mind you (they exist though), but an attempt to make a story out if it. There’s a lot more of it from Japan than the US at least. On a side note, I’ve always wondered who produces more pornography in general: the US or Japan. Both churn out thousands of titles a year… but who puts out more in sheer volume? Okay, sure, Japan has a more diverse media market when it comes to sex (like eroge obviously), but the US has it’s own fetish leads. It absolutely dominates in the interracial field for example… and the US embraced straight-to-digital in whole before Japan did.
On English romantic novels: there’s a lot of intricate plot. You can Google up sites and forums devoted to dissecting them. The focus and topics are different though, because those are primarily aimed at a female market with Western values and hobbies, while eroge are mostly aimed at males with Japanese values and hobbies. Case in point: Vampires. Your eroge vampires tend to follow a more Hellsing or Vampire Hunter D flavor (both being major influences there), whereas the English romantic novels stay closer to the original Dracula and Carmilla guidelines (i.e. powerful, but not to godlike extremes).
Loathe as many of us would admit, the Twilight-verse has as much “fluff mythology” as, say for example, the Type-Moon universe. If you comb through their wiki long enough, you’d find it has lots of info on bloodlines, powers, species, traditions, alternate earth history, etc. Certainly far more than I thought when I first mined through it on a whim to see what all the hoopla was about.
That being said… as for number of authors? Can’t find info… however according to Wikipedia: In 2008, romantic fiction generated $1.37 billion in sales, with 7,311 romance novels published and making up 13.5% of the consumer book market. I’d say it’s larger than eroge in published numbers and definitely sales. Of course it takes fewer people to create a romance novel than an eroge… I don’t wanna say less work, because there’s definitely a lot of work involved to get a book printed by a professional publisher. That’s just counting the professionally published titles… vanity press and fanfiction probably ramps that number into the ten thousands.
Hey, I sort of blogged about eroge vs romantic novels the other day. If you please, let this newbie throw her hat into the ring? With the rising fame of titles such as 50 Shades of Grey, which includes high amounts of explicit content BDSM and some of more fetish-like materials that ironically isn’t too far removed from some eroge, I think you could certainly draw a few parallels between both genres. I believe its success has led to a slightly increased presence of “erotic fiction” getting mainstream bookstore shelf-space. However, it is all the rage among women, while many eroge [aside from the occasional R-18 otome game, which to the best of my knowledge, none have been translated, even unofficially] are aimed at men. Perhaps that’s what separates the two in the West at least. And while this may be more fit for the BL topic, I, in my bookstore browses, have come across publishing imprints aimed at male-male romance novels for women. So to say there’s little BL audience in the US isn’t all correct, though I suppose it may be tough to reach them. ;p Just some tired musings over here.
[As a side note, could we get some R-18 otome over here? ;p]
Just throwing in my 2cents based on recent conversation.
I always felt like the time taken to release titles was one of mangagamers major factors for going with Nukige.
Their story based titles have taken what…6 months+ to prepare for release? The ‘major sales’ come from new titles so they’d want to get something new out every so often rather then once/twice a year. Unlike JAST they aren’t getting profits from other areas ( Jlist/Jbox ) to counteract the time taken so they rely on the sales of titles to make a profit. No new titles = less sales = less profit
Of the 5 titles they announced in June:
5/5 have completed translation
5/5 have completed being De-mosaiced
3/5 have completed image editing (1/5 in progress)
2/5 have completed scripting/insertion (1/5 in progress)
0/5 have completed testing (2/5 in progress)
Meanwhile Otome Wa Boku Ni Koishiteru was announced in February and still has yet to enter testing.
They generally don’t release 2 titles a month so that gives them a steady stream of titles. Counting the 3 others they’re working on that covers them for 8 months.
That’s 8 months of time they can put to working on other aspects, such as:
Story based titles (they now have the time available to do them)
Yea… but in a “better” environment where 6000 sales is still considered a challenge…
EDIT
But then, it’s non-nukige the 6K numbers were talking about.
EDIT 2
Time isn’t all that important so long as sales are met. There’s a lot of business models that factor only a handful of products per year, so long that said products sell enough. Since wordy games take longer to translate, and cost more to license for export, they charge more per box and/or must sell more of them at lower cost. That plan does not appear to work for MG. So it’s not really time to produce that’s an issue, it’s the factor of not making back the money in enough time after release… or just not making back the money at all.
In the console market, the largest game sales occur in the first 90 days. After that? Loss of interest, piracy, and secondhand resale sap away the numbers. It can take the sum of several additional years, to match the first 90 day numbers again. I’m sure MG has an “amount after release” they’d like to reach within X number of days. Maybe it’s 90… maybe it’s 180… but there has to be some kind of line to determine when something was worth the effort. Non-nukige have the greatest problem crossing that goal.
Nukige are either cheaper to make, or actually sell much better, and don’t fall into that problem so much… or at least, that’s the vibe I’ve been given.
The other thing about nukige is that they can near standard eroges in terms of development costs, especially since the CG count vs length ratio tends to be much higher than for typical eroges, but in localisation you only have to pay for the text (which is generally much smaller) and I guess the voices (also fewer when comparing two voiced titles) - so they’re probably (relatively) better for MangaGamer than they were for the original developers.
Not totally related to this, but me n some acquaintances were chatting how Katawa Shoujo has introduced new players to the genre,
People are looking at games like KLS, YMK, crescendo, family project etc. after going through KS.
so would that be a sign of increase in market, especially the story driven ones?
Lower Translation Costs + Steady if not great demand is probably the reason IMO as well.
