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.
