Well, it’s not official word; the official word is this:
The bit I was referring to was a quote from the below comments in the blog post announcing the game:
For official word, we’ll have to wait until the next blog post. (They say it should be sometime this week.) But the first guy - sloanereinja - sure sounds like either a MangaGamer employee or one of the guys who was working on the fan translation. Who this “anon” is, well, there’s no way to tell.
But also consider this - the companies aren’t always going to be able to tell you all the information you want to know in order for you to decide whether to boycott or not. If the above quote is correct, I can pretty much guarantee that MangaGamer won’t say that in their official announcement. Badmouthing companies you have to work with in the future is not a terribly good idea. Likely all we’re going to find out in a case like this is “there is a problem with the licensor and we can’t get the voices”.
When BaseSon itself decided to cut the voices out of KoiHime, they were up front with the reasons concening why they felt it had to happen. But that is because it was BaseSon’s decision, and MangaGamer is run by people from BaseSon. If there are snafus with other rightsholder, then it’s much more likely that we’ll get vague statements about “problems” and “impossibilities”.
The first company to try h-game translation was MegaTech. They released a few games, then folded. And it’s a shame, too: they cut a deal with Elf. They officially released one of the Dragon Knight games as Knights of Xentar. (They recently re-activated; at least, someone using the name is selling some kinda iOS app based off the gfx from one of the old titles). A bunch of other companies started up around that time frame, released a few titles, then went bust.
Jast USA is pretty much the only company from that early batch of companies to still be around in any form. However, it’s as a brand name only (because it’s got seriously old name recognition): Jast of Japan went under. More about the history of Jast USA is on a thread here. After Jast didn’t exist anymore, Jast USA didn’t have any new games (other than Transfer Student) in the pipeline, so Peter decided to start a new brand. That was Peach Princess.
Eventually, much later, he decided Jast was a much more recognizable name in the West, so he decided to reorg under that name.
Other than MangaGamer, G-Collections is pretty much the only h-game translation outfit that was around after Peach Princess started. (There was that one company … Hobibox Europe? They released a Viper game or two, and announced several more that never materialized. Peach Princess tried to rescue one of the games, but technical problems doomed the project.) They also originally had a website selling games, then they became a game translation arm of CD-BROS. Then CD-BROS collapsed, and Peter waltzed in and picked up the pieces.
There are only two companies he did that to: G-Collections, and RCY America/Milky House. But Milky House only put out a few games compared to GC’s huge library, so Milky House isn’t a label, but just a single product (Milky House Collection) which is now out of print.
As far as I know:
Otaku Publishing, I think the company is still around, but the story I heard is that they were forced to abandon h-game translation by government pressure. Himeya Soft, I believe their partner C’s Ware went under. Their import business went under much later - earlier this year. RCY America/Milky House (not sure what the difference between these two is), I dunno why they went under. But I do know the Japanese company no longer exists and the rights to at least one game (Nocturnal Illusion) seem to be in limbo. Hobibox Europe and MegaTech I think just went broke. G-C was basically a subsidiary of a Japanese outfit that went broke. Jast USA/Peach Princess, Kitty Media, and MangaGamer are still around.
That’s all the localization companies I can remember. I’m not sure, but I think that accounts for everybody. I became a fan of h-games back in college, around 1999 or so. But I didn’t exactly become a, uh, regular customer / board regular until Peach Princess started up and I realized these were not, in fact, abandonware. So there’s a period of time that is before I was around.
Yes, sloanreinja is the name our Editor uses on the blog and forums. If you look at the blog posts, you’ll see some of them are authored by him as well.
And yes, we will be discussing both why the voices were unable to be obtained, and why we still decided to release this game despite that in the post that will be going up towards the end of this week. We predicted there would be a lot of knee-jerk reactions to the lack of voices, which is why we decided to wait and give everyone a chance to calm down before discussing it in hopes that everyone would lend us their ears and listen intelligently.
Kouryuu, are the license holders of the voice track aware that people will just rip the voices from the Japanese version and make a fan-patch? Have you explained that gamers are still going to get voices, but they won’t see a yen in royalties this way? It seems like a bad business decision.
Pointing that out to the license holders is not a very good idea. Give us the voices, or some “hackers” (who have nothing to do with us for reals we totally swear) will add them back in? I can’t think of a way to get that point across without implying either a) MangaGamer itself will create the patch and pretend it was by anonymous hackers, or b) MangaGamer is incapable of defending their IP.
Neither one of those is a message I’d really care to send.
Since not everyone on this forum follows our forums or twitter, I wanted to post the news here as well:
Bamboo, president of OVERDRIVE, will be hosting his first live stream for Western VN/eroge fans tonight at 2AM GMT (so 10 PM for those of us on the East Coast, 7 PM for those on the West coast) on UStream here: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/mangagamers-from-japan
Anyone and everyone is welcome to watch and participate.
It was very interesting to actually have the live chat with Bamboo. So many questions, so many answers, and still not enough. I look forward to future chats like this.
I don’t think that’s AKABEi’s fault, except for making games so good people actually wanted to translate them =P
Anyway I don’t think ‘guest at anime con’ exactly translates to ‘future localisation partner’ but who knows any more. AKABEi has plenty of highly regarded titles (Sinsemilla, Artemis, Rui, Sharin, G-Sen) but none I’d really paint as a money spinner for Mangagamer given their relative obscurity among people who don’t already play their games. Trite as it is to count on anime and manga with existing popularity to draw people to the original works, it’s at least somewhat effective. Their games are also above average in length, compounding the localisation costs (amount to translate, cost of voices etc.)
If they get a deal with Akb2 they will mostly likely choose something already translated (Based on deals made in the past)
No one will buy x because they’ve already read it>>>Deal booms and no more titles.
I’ll admit my main reason for wanting Akabesoft2 is for Akatsuki Works’ stuff and considering the popularity of Comyu, MG could try going for that if a deal is ever made.
If you want popular, Akatsuki no Goei wiped the floor with both of them in terms of sales (and G-Senjou no Maou wiped the floor with Akatsuki no Goei but anyway). About the only good AKABEi title that didn’t sell that wonderfully was Tasogare (despite coming 2nd in the 2ch rankings)
I look forward to future chats like this.