WOW! a bank page, its been a while since I visited one.
Actually I tried 2 of the trials, decent sex-romps. Lets keep the fingers crossed at what happens.Maybe they are just revamping.
An anonymous poster on the gemot forums claims to have sent this e-mail (trolling out of boredom) last week. The page was blanked shortly after, although it’s yet unknown if this was the cause.
We don’t know how much they were paying for their server and how much bandwidth they had.
Hm. Well certainly they could have misjudged their demand and rent an inappropriately expensive server. I still think that the Alexa stats below speak for themselves. You can see that MangaGamer.com made a slight splash about a year ago then receded. Most probably because their initial translation just plain sucked. But they have rebounded since than on their success of Kira Kira and their newer translations. Their presence on AX 09, Otakon 2009, and their advertisement on sankaku complex might have a teensy-weensy bit to do with this :D. Compare HgameZ.net to them. They stayed flat the whole time. I think that this is a pretty strong indicator for death by obscurity.
That graph is a little concerning. According to that, July 2008 - Present web traffic for the eroge localization market as a whole has been significantly less than the first half of 2008 (looks like web traffic decreased by about 2/3). It’s rebounded a bit since July (and the anime conventions), but it’s still not at previous levels. If that correlates with sales (no reason it shouldn’t), then sales have been decreasing despite a definite increase in quality releases over the past year. It’s probably due to the global recession, but it’s still cause for concern.
Aside from what Shiki said, I find it interesting that GC has the largest spikes in activity (as least, it did before 2009). Does anyone know of a reason for this?
Here’s a guess:
G-Collections released more games than Peach Princess during the late 2007 - mid 2008 period. Each game release causes a spike in activity, and it’d make sense that the game company releasing more games would see more overall activity. Note, however, that Peach Princess sells lots of different brands, while GC only sells GC games. Thus PP activity is smoothed out somewhat, while GC’s isn’t–thus the big spikes for GC and the many smaller bumps for PP.
Even among pirates, I’ve noticed much less discussion of recent games, so the issue might go beyond the recession.
Already, I felt that much momentum had been lost between G-Collections’ closure and JAST USA’s subsequent revival of the brand. In 2007, Yume Miru Kusuri generated quite a bit of buzz on visual novel forums (as well as pirate communities and GameFAQs, where most posters also admit to pirating eroge). However, following releases seem to have been met with declining interest, with 2009 titles more or less ignored.
Well…there has also been an increase in the talk about mangagamer’s lineup though so this may be why as well. YMK was probably an exception to the rule for those who tend to hang out on such boards which tend to be like many here, prefering good storylines in general over sex-romps.
The last report on what is going on with them (which is on the first page of this topic), is that their page has been blanked.
Are you saying you can’t even connect to the URL anymore?
it’s called a recession.
They are back online now.