Yo! I had a question about something a little more subtle that's more a matter of curiosity than anything. With the relaunch, have you permanently retired JAST's sub-labels (Peach Princess, G-Collections, and JAST Densetsu) as a thing?
When Densetsu was originally announced in 2011, my understanding was that pretty much all of your new titles would come out under that label, and Peach Princess and G-Collections would mostly just appear on sequels to their existing titles. However, I haven't heard the word "Densetsu" bandied around in about a year or so, and it's been longer than that for GC and PP.
I checked my physical copies of "Littlewitch" and "Steins:Gate", and those say "JAST USA" and "NitroPlus", respectively. Are those going to be your only two labels for the forseeable future, with the others just as historical reference? Again, I'm not viewing this as either a good or a bad thing -- just curious about whether we will ever see the others on the outside of a box again.
Back in 2011 we made many announcements at our Anime Expo JAST USA panel. It was a great event. One of those announcements was about our brands and labels. Here's an image from the presentation:
Starting in 2015, we're retiring the Peach Princess, G-Collections and JAST Densetsu brands, merging them all under JAST USA.
After some analysis, we determined there was customer confusion over the brands, and it was best to merge them into one.
In the case of Nitroplus, the "Nitro+" brand is the developer we're working with, not a label of ours. When we work with certain companies, like Nitro+, we agree to reduce our branding and promote their brand on the game. This was the case for Steins;Gate and other Nitro+ brand games.
Understood – that’s pretty much what I thought, but again, I thought I’d confirm it from the source. And any nostalgia for the old brands aside, I think this makes good sense as a business move. Back when I was first getting into visual novels, I found the whole “three names, one company” thing very confusing.
For any who wondered, the whole "have many different brands" thing is what Japanese companies do, so we were picking up the vibe from them on that. Most eroge companies will have several brands to show to categorize different kinds of games, or to separate different teams. Back in the long ago, a given company wouldn't want their game released under the JAST logo because that was a specific company that we started out working with...long gone now, of course. That was where Peach Princess came from, and G-Collections (which was another company that we took over the operations for), and so on.
Hopefully we'll have a much smoother ride going forward.
I think it's a good policy to brand nukige and non-nukige separately. That aside, the original labels didn't make much sense from a customer standpoint, so I'd say a single label is an improvement over multiple labels without a clear identity.
Good point. And we really did envision having "JAST Densetsu" for our top-tier games. We wouldn't brand a Moero Downhill Night level game as that.