At the higher end, the pricing is equivelent to the console industry. As we’ve all known, that means the profit margin is crap in comparison to the console market. Yet another reason why eroge doesn’t exactly “flood” American markets. I was kinda shocked in a small way. I’ve been under the assumption that eroge companies “worked for less” since they were doing it for love of the hobby. I’m sure there are some who do… but I’m embarrassed to learned that assumption was wrong. They basically charge the same price as someone who works at CAPCOM or Nintendo.
Then again, considering the tremendous risks in terms of profit return, I guess that’s where the “love for the hobby” comes in.
I think I should point out, that the pricing is predominantly if the eroge is being completly “outsourced” (i.e. commissioned) for work. I assume the moderate and larged sized eroge companies have a source of “inhouse” talent, just like the console industry. In that case, the artists/musicians/writers aren’t being paid on a “per item” basis, but a salary paycheck. In the long term, its cheaper that way. However artists/musicians/writers obviously make more on the “per item” basis, so that’s what the first class people charge: the independants and freelancers that go around getting hired by all eroge companies, one title at a time.
If you outsourced everything, as those price estimates go, it end up costing as much as a “middle class” console game (and arguable a first class handheld game). Were I someone paying for all this, I’d rather do the console game, than a niche PC bgame.
That site quotes 150,000 to 300,000 yen per megabyte. Assuming they use Shift-JIS encoding, then that means you’re getting paid roughly $1500 to $3000 to write 3-4 light novels. That’s a LOT of text. At best, you get around $1000 for writing a light novel. You’d get the same amount of money by doing like 5 CGs. Put into this context, I’m pretty sure the writing makes less money per time quantity spent.
No, that’s the price under ??? (script). Scripting produces a lot more text a lot faster. The price listed for ??? (scenario) is 1 yen per BYTE. That’s $10,000 to write 3-4 light novels. That’s not an insignificant amount!
well that part is wrong. under most fonts Japanese characters are 2-bytes. However the irony is the more kanji-heavy they make the games, the less they get under most modern font systems. However, if they used furigana they could get even more.
What part is wrong? I never said they weren’t 2 bytes. Well, it’s not a matter of the font - if shift-jis is used, the characters, kana or kanji, are all going to be two bytes. If a UTF-16 / UCS-2 variant is used (Light uses this, for example), the characters are still going to be two bytes. If UTF-8 is used (I know of no Japanese VNs that use this, though) the majority of Japanese characters will be 3 bytes. So yeah, 2 bytes per character is a good rule in general - which means two yen per character.
Well, that question is reasonably easy to answer - most don’t. For the few that manage to turn a profit through sales, though… let’s consider the two main cases I know of where a doujin circle managed to become a commercial visual novels company - Type-Moon and AKABEi SOFT. The reason they were able to break into the market with such high costs is that they didn’t have to pay those costs. Not directly, anyway.
If you consider Tsukihime, Nasu wrote the entire script and Takeuchi drew all the art and composed all them music. The backgrounds were processed photographs. There were thus no outside costs for art, none for scenario or scripting, none for music or sound effects. The game does not contain an OP movie, nor does it contain significant animation. There were no voices, and a freeware engine (nscripter) was used. Therefore, nearly all of the costs were avoided because nothing was contracted outside the circle - Nasu and Takeuchi basically did everything.
Now, if you consider A Profile, a significantly less successful doujin VN, but still successful enough to allow AKABEi SOFT to form themselves a commercial company, AKABEi SOFT2. In this case, most of the artists came from within the circle itself (and I believe LooseBoy, who wrote the scenario, was also part of the circle) and perhaps some of the music was either contracted out or created by ‘mixed up’ staff, who AKABEi SOFT were working with. The opening movie… may have been contracted out? I don’t recall. Either way, they were able to absorb the development costs by using a mixture of in-house development work and selective outsourcing, coupled with selling the game at a fairly low price to sell enough units to produce a reasonable amount of profit.
Sorry for the miscom. I was referring to the article in that 1 character = 1 byte. And yes, it makes sense why UTF-8 isn’t used because very little romaji font is used a a lot more kanji is.
Basically the answer to both is in-house work + atleast semi-successful game.
Yeah; typically, contracted work is to add a little extra something to the game to make it especially special. For example, scenario writers are often employed on contract terms as far as I can tell - which is a decent idea, from my perspective, because I’ll buy any game that has Looseboy’s name attached to it, and probably the same with Tanaka or Setoguchi. Famous artists are likely in similar demand - I’ll probably end up getting pretty much any game with Carnelian’s name attached to it if it piques my interest at all. Thus, having famous names attached to a project can help boost sales, making it worthwhile.
Yeah, I’m pretty much sold if ??? is the scenario writer for the game. That’s why I’m watching Minatosoft like a hawk now. Candysoft has went downhill ever since they lost Takahiro.
On another note, as I said in a much earlier thread I am trying to make a game on Tsukihime’s level but with low budget it might be hard since it’s not like I got my own version of Takeuchi to help me out with the art and music. Even so I’ve got over pages and pages of story and script already done. I’m presently just holding out until I can find a proper artist in Japan so this project is likely to be protracted for years. Realistically I knew that I could use a freeware engine and do the entire story and scripting, but I know for a fact that the art is not possible for me. Farming out my art is gonna be a massive bitch. Though I must admit that it was a great idea to reprocess photographs. I heard the background CG is often the hardest and most expensive part of any given project.
Absurdist , I suppose you doing 3D model renders is out of the question? Otherwise, you’d just need to get a pro to do the model data, and then you could manipulate the models and render the art/scenes as desired. With the correct styling of the models, you might find that acceptable for your purposes.
I’m also watching Minatosoft with interest, although I’m starting to wonder of Takahiro himself has taken a bit of a slide after Tsuyokiss. We’ll see - I’m very interested in their next game.
Nah, it has to be traditional CG that we’ve all gotten used to seeing in other eroge.
Also, I loved Kimiaru so I don’t know what you meant by Takahiro going downhill although I have to admit that it didn’t quite have the same endearing impact that Tsuyokiss did. Either way I really hope he doesn’t drop the ball on his latest game, the concept is just brilliant and I can see his love for Otome is now being fanned out into multiple characters. This is good because I also really liked Otome from Tsuyokiss.
