Regarding JAST USA and MangaGamer, the situations are quite different. MG is largely financed and run by the Japanese developers, who’re naturally inclined to insist on the release of their flagship (“representative”) titles. That’s probably why a project as crazy as Koihime Musou was picked - currently, it’s Nexton’s heavyweight.
OTOH, JAST USA seems more or less independent (JAST, Will, and Crowd made investments at some point, but it’s clearly Peter Payne’s company), which means greater leeway in deciding what to translate.
Talk about don’t face the truth :roll:
I’m owning a Blog specialized in Full CG Save and Walkthrough.
And most of the DL for them come from people who got a pirated version (i can see from divers statistique from which site they come from, and most of the link point out site with illegal copy of the game).
That is a fact, western people tend to pirate Eroge not buy them…
If t’s because of the quality of their earliest translation… Then you can stop because the quality is now good to very good and it’s not an argument anymore.
In fact, it’s now stupid… Since Jast did far worse with Kaizoku Keikaku and XC3…
if it’s because the price is in ¬Ä, it’s even more stupid and almost racist… I don’t boycott Jast because it’s in $ (well in fact, it’s cheaper for me :mrgreen: )
If it’s because of Download only version… It’s even more stupid.because, when you’re a old gamer, like me, when you’e moving in a new house, Boxed version take a fucking lof of place, and you don’t play 99% of those game anymore… So it take place for nothing.
Well, anyway, i don’t see any reason to boycott MG.
Yes, it’s pretty obvious eroge gets pirated up the whazoo. However, how much gets pirated is not important; how many lost sales is. How many of those who pirated the games would’ve bought them anyway if they weren’t able to pirate them? Rather than try to wrack one’s brains to figure this out from incomplete data, I think one should focus on expanding the idea of eroge and visual novels to people who’ve never even heard of this genre of games (and hence less likely to even know about well established communities for pirating said games).
You must wrack your brain about this big problem.
A good exemple :
I put online the save for Kaizoku Keikau at end of April.
Around middlfe of june, the Dl count for it was about 15/20 or so… Then, suddently, in a mere 3 day, the DL count got over 1200.
Now, 3 month later the DL count is near 1800… And i highly doubt that Jast sold around 1200 copy of it in 3 day and 1800 in 3 month… So i searched, and i found about 2/3 of community spÈcialied in Hentai stuff with the link to my save on it, of course with a Pirated version of the game.
I won’t list my specific reasons, as I haven’t in any other thread, because I am not against the western VN market. I give them that courtesy. The things you listed may have been around the 10’s. My first reason is something unforgivable in my eyes and for that I knew I wouldn’t play their games. Everything else was the little things that added up.
With that said. I like to buy full games. If you felt bad about the bad things JAST did and bought the games anyways it is your own fault. You could have sent a message by not buying it, you know? You’re not one of those people who think buying every game means you support the industry, are you? You should buy the games that interest you from the companies you have confidence in. Is thinking about what is worth purchasing and who is worth purchasing from such a bad thing?
The point you’re ignoring is the fact that pirated copies does not translate to lost sales! You can’t look at 10000 pirated copies and deduce that it’s 10000 people who would have bought the game otherwise, or 1000, or even 100, you can’t deduce any number because you don’t know why these people pirate, the broad spectrum of reasons why they do etc.
Combatting piracy is far less important than exposure. We need to expand the market by introducing new people to these games. Not waste time fighting piracy, because it won’t do anything and the common methods for doing so (DRM etc.) also lose you legitimate sales because some people refuse to touch anything with DRM.
While nothing justifies piracy, I have been in a position of not playing certain games because I felt their DRM was too draconian. It is the main reason I am not a PC gamer instead of the entry cost compared to consoles.
Piracy translate, 90% of the time, in lost sale for the Western market of eroge.Most of westerner don’t consider eroge has game but has fap material and they don’t like to buy fap material (because they fear that society will brand them has pervert).
Combating Piracy is a priority has the same level of a Good Ads campaign
What a load of BS.Sorry for being rude, but i see it like that.
I’m planing of buying almost all the eroge released by Jast Group and MG (except 3 title : brave Soul, i played it a little with an illegal copy and trashed it quickly.DOR and Pretty Soldier… because i hate tentacle stuff and Yaoi… Because it’s my wife who buy them (Yaoi) :mrgreen: )
Yeah supporting Jast and MG.More money, more good eroge (or not… But, the near release of demonbane, the licencing of Yumina from Jast, and the Navel/Circus/overdrivre title from MG, tell me that the good way)
because my Japanese is basic and crappy since is stopped learning it a long time ago, and i like VN/Eroge
Because Officialy English translated Eroge cost a lot more tant imported one (I won’t pay 80¬Ä/$100 anymore for a crappu new released Nukige)
Because i’m not picky either (except for Tentacle and some other fetish)
After confidence hum?
I have confidence in Jast.Kaizoku Keikaku wasn’t much of a big thing and i completly undestand why they put a underwear on Matsuri and i agree with them.
Now it’s true that lately they’re too much of typo and ankward translation in Jast Game.And i agree with the fact that they suck in PR and Com.
Now MG, serisouly, overall they’re good… Ok the Compagny still not earn a lot of money, but the quality of the game and translation are overall in the good.
Now, comming back on the Koihime Musou problem.
The fact that Nexton complain that they don’t sell enough… Well, look at all the Nexton’s Game released by MG… Except Koihime Musou, they’re all Crappy Nukige… I’m not against Nukige at all, but when it’s a crappy one…
So i think the declaration of Nexton is just because Crappy Nukige are Crappy Nukige and they don’t sell even on the Western Market.
I’ll apologize for being less than civil. Obviously, more money to them is supporting the industry, but I don’t think buying games that don’t interest me does much good. I do admire people’s dedication to their hobbies. It may be that I am too picky in who gets my business and I seem to be the only one, so I’ll leave it at that and not address this anymore or allude to it elsewhere. Good luck.
Far too much picky.
i mean…Not buying Shuffle!, Overdrive’s title, Circus’s Title… it’s really being very picky.Since they’re seriously in the top 10 of the must have Eroge for the English Market.(Especially Overdrive’s title)
See, that’s the thing; how do you know it’s ‘90%’ of the time, or any other figure you can name? Heck, you just gave another reason for why people who pirated something wouldn’t necessarily buy it even if they hadn’t pirated it.
Let’s say you can do something to stop piracy, which you can’t- how many more sales would you get from that? And how do you know? 100? 10? Or is it ZERO?
The point is that piracy is something you can’t stop, you can’t even affect it; and every even slightly effective method of fighting piracy that exists will alienate your existing customers and cost you sales anyway.
So tell me how much people you think buy Eroge after getting a pirated version?
i don’t have precise number and such for the Eroge Market… but based on the study for the other part of the game Market… Doing a rough estimation it’s easy.
That does not measure what you think it measures. The question you have just posed asks:
“Out of all the people who pirated eroge X, how many people would buy it at some point?”
whereas what we were discussing was
“Out of all the people who pirated eroge X, how many people would’ve bought it if piracy weren’t an option?”
It is very hard to determine the latter.
It’s worse than that. That’s not even quite right. What you’re REALLY asking is how many people:
a) Pirated eroge X, and
b) did not buy eroge X, but
c) would have bought eroge X, at the price asked, if piracy weren’t available.
And if you want to get the REAL answer to the question of “What would the sales have been if there were no piracy?”, you also have to ask a related question: How many people:
a) Pirated eroge X, and
b) then decided to buy it, but
c) Would not have bought eroge X, at the price asked, if they hadn’t been exposed to it via piracy
I suspect the answer to the second question is a much lower number than the answer to the first question. But both are essentially unanswerable.
They don’t translate copy-for-copy, yes. That is true.
However, look at it this way. I guesstimated that Koihime is going to get about 20K pirate downloads. This seems to be a good estimate to me. If you were to connect to pirate trackers and count how many IPs were downloading the file, it would probably total up to that many unique IPs over a few months.
Now, we have confirmation that sales are in the hundreds of units. (This eventually builds up to > 1000, which is what Shuffle! was reported to be at.)
If even ten percent of my guesstimate would buy the game, that would TRIPLE their sales figures. And it is just as unreasonable to argue that the pirate-copies-downloaded : lost-sales ratio is around 10%, as it is to argue that it’s 100%. The truth is going to be somewhere in the middle.
This is why I don’t see it really being disputable that this is one market where piracy has a negative effect.
@#&(#&@(#&, why does everyone keep missing the main point?
HOW DO YOU KNOW that it is between 100% or 10%? How do you know it’s not 1%, or 0.1% (which is actually the figure that was released by some other study, but I don’t buy it either) or 0.01% or 0.001% or 0.0001% or just 0%? You DON’T. How is unreasonable to think that it is 100% or 10%, but not unreasonable (in fact, ‘the truth’) that it is going to be ‘somewhere in the middle’. Nobody has told me this yet! How do you know? Do you have some reports, ones that aren’t obviously commissioned by MediaSentry or a similar group, that show 23% or something, or even some ballpark figure? For it to be a guesstimation you would have actually had to apply some logic behind it, where is it? Show your work, please!
I am not disputing that piracy cannot lead to lost sales, but I am not arguing that it does either, and my whole point is that this is IRRELEVANT because it’s something you can’t stop and are more likely to harm your sales trying.
