Why would they insist on keeping them?
It has been mentioned a few times on the forums here in the past, but it basically sums up to them being worried about legal repercussions. A great example is to read the post regarding demonbane’s localization decisions on the hscenes. In that post, Nitro+ expressed concerns regarding removing censorship from their games because a business could import it into Japan for sale, and Nitro+ is based there meaning they could get in trouble, thus, JAST was forced to put the “outside Japan only” watermarks on hscenes.
Jesus christ…
Yes, it is a bit ridiculous. I personally think it is a small price to pay for the opportunity to experience it in english though. It was either that or probably not getting the game at all.
It also seems unprofessional…
example
-fap- -fap- -fap- -huh?- -the hell is that- -stop fap- -stop enjoying-
I don’t mind having outside japan only watermark lol. If its gonna be like what they showed on one example picture. If its just that on all the h cgs, it won’t bother me xD
It’d be hilarious if the watermark was placed right over the good bits. I’d lol so hard at first, but then go into a fit of rage and buy a plane ticket to JAST’s office and bring the smackdown on them.
I don’t think this is true. I have done some research on this topic. It turns out that JAST and MG really do operate differently.
MG’s localization is actually funded by the eroge developers that are willing to translate their games, so in the case of Koihime, it was Baseson that funded its localization and not MG. I found this out from a comment from an MG employee on one of their blog posts. So people who are saying that “MG doesn’t have enough money to get voices” are technically incorrect. It is that Baseson doesn’t want to pay to license the voices outside of Japan unless they can make their money back. Since it is Baseson’s first title outside of Japan, it would make sense why they are being cautious. It would probably be more accurate to say that MG is a localization service and an “agent” than a publisher if you ask me.
JAST on the other hand does some translating in-house and contracts some out, but they also serve as a publisher in the true sense. They likely wholly own the license to the title, which would mean they would have to pay for it all. MG seems like it shares the license ownership with the eroge companies and gets a small portion of the sales.
So I don’t think it can really be said that MG is losing money because they are the ones being funded by the eroge companies and just act as seller for them in the english market. It would seem they have themselves in a sweet spot if you ask me.
i hope they put the voices in harukoi otome
I am positive they will. Koihime was due to the sheer number of voice actors they had, and each one has to be paid again if they want to use their voices in a different market.
G-collections was funded in the same way when they were an independent outfit. Then the entire group that was involved sank in Japan. Now part of it I think is that the quality of their products started slipping a bit - but I’m convinced that they sunk so much money into attempting to establish a beachhead in the Western market that it sank the whole company.
So yes, MangaGamer itself might not be losing money, because its investors keep pumping more into it to keep it afloat. But that doesn’t even really matter. Koihime Musou has sold (according to their Twitter feed) about 666 copies in its first 3 weeks on sale. And this has been described as blowing away all sales records for all of their previous games.
It is a fairly good assumption that MangaGamer has sold < 1K units of most of their games. Therefore it is probably a good estimate to compute 1000 * (price of game) as a good upper bound on how much money they’ve made. (They’ll actually have made less, since this figure will significantly OVER-estimate the amount of money they have made.)
Note 1: I excluded bundles from this figure. That would double count: 1K sales of Kira Kira and 1K sales of Kira Kira Bundle Pack would be 2K total Kira Kira sales.
Note 2: This figure is in US Dollars, not Euros. Neither figure is in Yen, which is how the Japanese side is going to be using it. I make no attempt to adjust for exchange rates from 2 years ago vs rates now.
Note 3: Uses current prices only. MG’s prices used to be significantly higher. MG said sales went up from the cut, so I’d expect the underestimation due to this to be low. Further, the size of the error is much less than that from assuming 1K units sold of everything.
Note 4: Estimate includes Koihime and Guilty both at 1K, even though we know Koihime’s sold maybe 700 copies now; Guilty just launched and has probably sold a few hundred at most. Knock off about 40K if you want to correct for this.
Having crunched all the numbers, I come up with around six hundred thousand dollars for Mangagamer’s adult titles, and $150K for the non-adult games. They’ve released 18 adult games and 7 non-adult games. And this estimate is grand total, across the entire lifetime of the company. Mangagamer opened in July 2008; we’re close to their third anniversary.
$750K in total revenue - maximum; this is a significant over-estimation of their actual revenue, if Shuffle! was their best-seller and it struggled to break 1K - over a three year period is quite simply terrible. They have worked on 25 games in that time, and they have had a lot of expenses related to all the work they’ve done and the upkeep. They are almost certainly losing money. And also, time that the Japanese staff is spending dealing with MangaGamer stuff is time and energy they’re not spending on the Japanese market, which is far more lucrative for them. So you also have to keep in mind - each these companies could have released maybe an additional game in Japan, had they chosen not to become involved with MG.
Just a general real quick note: Recettear has sold more than four times as many copies as all of MangaGamer’s library put together. Probably closer to ten times as many.
Well, Recettear has Steam. I don’t think it’s a fair comparison…
And don’t forget, Mangagamer approached Steam but Steam declined them.
I hope JAST USA has better luck with Steam re: Eien no Aselia. Not that they’ve mentioned trying but it seems like a logical move.
Actually, it DID come up in the Eien no Aselia thread. They said they’d look into it.
That means never bringing it up again. [size=50]god I’m clever![/size]
Sounds like one to skip for me anyway …
Yep, waste of resources.