The interview is up at http://moe.vg/1ENvtGz (Soundcloud app). Feel free to discuss the thread here, since I know you'll discuss it elsewhere ^_^
Please be gentle with me. I hate my voice...
I really enjoyed the interview, lots of interesting topics and a great discussion overall. No gripes with your voice, but I can tell you were thrown off your game a little with the fetish question (understandably so), especially since you were asked the question by a lady. LOL.
I do hope you can convince Nitro+ to release their games on steam, it would benefit both of your companies and the visual community as a whole by having some of the higher quality story focused titles available on that platform. It’s worth emphasizing that these steam releases would serve both as a distinct product for sale as well as an advertizement for the full game that you sell. Because you’re games are DRM free and easier to purchase than those of your competition, steam customers will be much more likely to buy your adult version, especially if it comes with a steam key, than they would for MG’s releases.
The piece about the VA Mafia was interesting too. The whole dynamic seems strange to begin with. It seems to me that the act of voicing a novel should be a service the developer purchases from the voice agency which consequently becomes the developer’s property. The current system makes it appear that the developer is simply leasing ownership from the talent agency which seems backwards to me.
I agree with your assessment that the government should probably intervene as this practice is causing financial harm to developers looking to expand their markets. The same could also be said for censorship of Japanese adult media in general but that would be a much tougher sell politically.
The statement you made about voting with your money is an important one, already purchased my LE copy of Starless, and I hope the sales will be enough to bring over other titles from Sei Shoujo. I hope you’ve got those XXL size posters and banners, featuring Sei’s amazing artwork, ready for convention season to sell some Starless!!!
Thanks for the warm comments. Yes, we're totally interested in getting more games on Steam. Nitro+ is a pretty smart company so they will probably go along in the end.
Supposedly the VA system was set up as a way for unattractive but talented voice actors to have a secure life, and we know how awesome Japan's VAs are. The system of extorting money for every game, and drawing no distinction between a PS4/Vita/whatever release and a teeny tiny U.S. release is really bad for the industry as a whole. It means nothing new can be tried, not without crowdsourcing (which is only available in some cases, e.g. non ero, and Japanese companies hate it in general).
I was surprised that you endorsed restoration patches for censored Steam titles. I appreciate your support for restoration patches for titles censored for political reasons (Starless and Shiny Days), but you sell Littlewitch Romanesque uncensored in the JAST store--at a $15 premium over the Steam version ($40 vs. $25). If you endorse these unofficial Steam restoration patches, then you've basically given fans your blessings to flee the much more expensive JAST store and use Steam instead. Sure, the JAST store version came out sooner (in the case of Littlewitch Romanesque), and it's DRM-free, but to many that won't be worth the 60% price hike for essentially the same product. I want to support JAST, and in particular I want to support the release of more high-quality eroge, but it kind of seems like casual Steam users are getting a discount rate while your most devoted fans are getting stuck paying full price. Seems a bit unfair.
Also, could you comment on your targeted release date of Shiny Days for "before Anime Expo " (July 1)? The JAST store says August 25th. Which should we believe?
I thought the interview was fun. I told a friend of mine to listen to this interview as well since it was pretty good/interesting to listen to. The funny 'weirdest thing that's ever happened to you' part at the end was a favorite part of mine. I look forward to hopefully going to AX this year and meeting you and the JAST/JLIST team! I want to hear more about what you will announce. Hopefully you get some good games to bring over. If you manage to release Shiny Days before AX I will be surprised and pretty happy since I've waited forever for this game.
Dark_Shiki, like app stores which force all prices down to the 99 cent level (in the case of mobile), Steam is overall a bad thing because it makes fans see LWR as worth less than the $35-$40 it totally is worth based on its quality and gameplay time. Among other things, we can't charge a price that the Japanese parent company will agree to let us charge. In the immortal words of someone, "Oyari-san gotta eat too."
Steam patches are part of the overall business environment of selling 18+ software in 2015. If we could edit the hell out of Starless, then sell a Steam version to 100,000 fans knowing they'd patch it back to its original version, the industry would be fine with that, and Steam would be fine with it, as long as it's done under the table. I don't think they'd let us do that though.
"Among other things, we can't charge a price that the Japanese parent company will agree to let us charge."
This sentence confuses me. Do you mean you can't change the price of a game on the JAST store without the explicit permission of the Japanese rightsholder?
"Steam is overall a bad thing because it makes fans see LWR as worth less than the $35-$40 it totally is worth based on its quality and gameplay time"
I'm sure the Japanese company would argue it's totally worth the $48 they charge based on its quality and gameplay time! Value is a relative concept. ;-)
Yes, if we drop a price the licensor obviously needs to be on board with this decicion. We've had to devote no small amount of time to certain companies letting them know that "Steam sales" were a thing that they had to let us do. Remember that these companies live in a magical fairy land where H-games can be sold for 8800 yen/US$78.00 with mosaic censorship. They say things like, "But we never dropped the price in Japan, how come you need to do that in the U.S." and it can be quite bizarre. We literally have an employee whose job is almost entirely to assuage weird responses by Japanese companies so they won't freak out when we do things that the market considers totally normal.
Remember that our main goal is to be a bridge between Japan and the rest of the world. Japan is a bizarre country not unlike the island Hong Kong was on, in which time doesn't work the same here. To understand Japan, look at what America and Europe were doing 10-25 years ago. Japan will pretty much always be in a time warp 10-25 years behind the U.S. and Europe in almost all things, including digital distribution of software.
So JAST USA's ultimate goal is more or less to bridge 2015 and, say, 2004 (to be charitable to Japan), and enable business to flow between the two.
@ Peter Payne
"Steam patches are part of the overall business environment of selling 18+ software in 2015."
"Among other things, we can't charge a price that the Japanese parent company will agree to let us charge."
If "official" steam patches are part of your business strategy going forward and the JAST store prices are fixed, then I'm in agreement with Dark Shiki that this is something that needs to be looked at.
For one this setup will obviously preclude simultaneous adult and steam releases as is MG's current practice. I don't think it'll hurt steam sales to release their version a few months after the adult version but I am concerned about current JAST customers who may decide to wait for the steam game.
The JAST download does offer some benefits (earlier release, no patching required, and DRM-free) but I'm concerned these benefits may not be strong enough to stop a significant segment of your existing customers from delaying their purchase until the steam version is released.
If you're going to keep this model in place you'll have to add some value to the JAST downloads. Obvious choices would be digital soundtracks and art books, however I don't think that would be strong enough of a deterrent. Maybe the ability to later purchase ome heavily discounted hard copy on j-list could be another benefit (not sure how the JAST and J-List are different companies thing would come into play though).
Another idea would be access to an exclusive mobile version download (adult and/or all ages) of the game that comes with your adult version (dl & hardcopy). I'm not sure if there's enough collective demand for such a version or if the development costs would outweigh the loss in revenue from cheaper steam games but its something to consider.
I do understand your current strategy though. All your games are DRM-free so a steam patch is only a matter of time (might as well give your new steam customers a helping hand) but at the same time the loss of revenue is something you should look into especially if you're considering to increase the volume of games sold on steam.
As a reference point, I personally hold out on all of MG's initial game releases until they either release a hard copy or I'm certain a hard copy won't appear and they put the game on sale for 50% off (the only exceptions I've made to this rule thus far is for the three Lilith games they've released).
Another approach to steam all together would be to raise the steam price much closer to your own digital price and to effectively use the steam page as an advertizement for your adult versions that include a free steam key. Most of your steam revenues would come from periodic steam sales. This method also wouldn't preclude a simultaneous release for the adult and steam versions. I think this is the approach a Japanese company would use but it may result in you loosing more money than you would under the current approach (with the tradeoff being higher visibility for your own retail sites).
Sorry for the long wall-o-text post; just wanted to share my thoughts on this issue.
The concern I have is that JAST store customers will emigrate to Steam, and as a result sales of the adult versions will stagnate or fall while sales of the all-ages versions will rise. Japanese companies will look at these sales numbers and think, "Is an adult version even necessary?". Peter might know better, but the Japanese companies won't, and they might start digging their heels in about issues like mosaics if they see no point in appealing to the 18+ market in the first place.
This is one of those subtle ways that Steam could actually sabotage the adult market, and unfortunately it's bound to happen whether Peter publically endorses Steam restoration patches or not. I don't think raising Steam prices is a viable solution, because that will just sabotage sales and no one is going to agree to that. Lowering JAST store prices to match the Steam version is one potential solution, but Japanese companies are going to be very resistant to that. I'm sure JAST already has a great deal of trouble convincing Japanese companies to accept the current English version price cut; any further and they might simply walk away from negotiations. It's just a bad situation all around. As a customer that supports JAST but also doesn't want to feel like I'm paying a premium for no good reason, I'm not sure what to do.
"It’s just a bad situation all around. As a customer that supports JAST but also doesn’t want to feel like I’m paying a premium for no good reason, I’m not sure what to do."
I’d say the answer is to increase the value of the more expensive product as I described above. We can debate over what that would actually be but I’m in agreement that the status quo will most likely cause a shift in buying behavior (at least for those titles that do make it to steam) if left unchecked.
†
I don't really think you can achieve parity between two versions of the same game with digital content, so long as 3rd parties are subverting the difference. If they can make a restoration patch, they can easily include the bonus goodies with that. And then you start to tread into the grey waters of what is merely a "fan modification" and what is just blatant piracy. I feel the only true differentiation that can be achieved between an adult version and a censored Steam version is in a boxed release. A boxed adult version is a different product that fans will buy for collector reasons. As for the digital version? Customers will simply tend to go for the best deal, and that means the JAST shop will lose relevance over time.
"I don't really think you can achieve parity between two versions of the same game with digital content, so long as 3rd parties are subverting the difference."
If that content is purely digital goods (artbook or OST) I'd agree with you, but there are other factors that can make a difference such as the time delay between the adult and steam release, error/glitch free product delivered on launch, lack of DRM, ability for digital customers to inexpensively upgrade to a hard copy (LE), etc. I think these are the types of things we should focus on.
"I feel the only true differentiation that can be achieved between an adult version and a censored Steam version is in a boxed release."
I don't think its the only means of differentiation but as someone who most certainly prefers a hard copy I can say it is an important means of differentiation.
"As for the digital version? Customers will simply tend to go for the best deal, and that means the JAST shop will lose relevance over time."
As long as Peter retains a healthy mix of genres this shouldn't come to pass; not every game released will have a steam edition. Although personally I wouldn't really mind if JAST became the site used to promote upcoming visual novels to fans and the place we go to redeem our DRM-free download vouchers included in our hard copies. Not sure how international customers would feel about that though...
Looking at the big picture though I think its very possible, and quite likely, that Peter has already considered the issue of lost of revenues and has written it off on account that any game sold on steam will make more money (JAST and Steam revenues combined) than any of his adult only titles.
Peter, if that's the case let us know and we can stop spinning our wheels!
I think you're right: the JAST shop losing relevance isn't necessarily bad in itself. Like I said, my fear is that Japanese companies will get the wrong idea if digital sales of 18+ versions fall sharply. I don't mind if the JAST shop just becomes the place I go to redeem my boxed version preorder digital code. But if I have to choose between a digital download for $40 on JAST's site and $25 on Steam (with a Steam restoration patch), I'll go for the cheaper option.
So when's that Steam version of Raidy 3 coming out?
Peter Payne: "Remember that these companies live in a magical fairy land where H-games can be sold for 8800 yen/US$78.00 with mosaic censorship. They say things like, "But we never dropped the price in Japan, how come you need to do that in the U.S."
Isnt the price actually 9240 yen? That seems to be Japan "59.99" and yes as someone who bought quite a few japanese version to use with the fan translated patches I can say that they indeed never lower the price, like ever, the only time when there is a price cut is if a "low price" version gets released many years later.
The selling model of eroges usually goes like this:
Release a first print limited edition of the game.
Either release a regular edition at the same time as the first print limited edition or release one after a few months. (some games only had a first print limited edition released, such as Comyu, which I am guessing is because the game was a flop?)
I would just love for JAST to make their limited edition hardcopies worth it. Just look at the LE version of Raidy 3. It comes with a game manual, 12 game cards, and a large outer box. Wooo. If it's anything like the Littlewitch hardcopy then everything included will fit in the disc case rendering the large box useless. To make things worse, there's nothing to hold the disc case in place within the large box to prevent it from rattling around.
@ B_Dun
I’m not that big a fan of the large boxes either; also if you’re short on space you can’t really afford too many of these big boxes…
For a single disc release I’d much rather prefer a slipcase, that has the same dimensions as the disc (as was done for Demonbane), which can hold the game case and the smaller bonus item(s). I’d just make the slipcase a little thicker (chipboard) for Limited Edition releases.
If there’s an art book as a bonus item its ok if it doesn’t fit in the game box because It’ll most likely go on people’s bookshelf anyways.
For special occasions it would be nice if JAST could commission a collectable metal art box made by Paul Champagne. For example if JAST releases Lewdness and Dominance in addition to Starless it would be awesome to be able to store them in one of these collector’s boxes. They could also commission metal boxes for their Nitro+ games.
Let's be honest: the Raidy series probably isn't going to generate the amount of fan enthusiasm that games like Starless and Shiny Days will. Those games are getting better LEs. For a $10 premium, you have to limit your expectations.