It’s at least a $20 premium considering the steam price…
Sure. I wasn’t even interested in Raidy until I saw the yuri tag. However, even the Starless LE release is okay at best. The interview is nice but an artbook of sketches from the game isn’t too great in my opinion. You already get the art in the game, why do you need to see it in half completed forms? As for Shiny Days, that LE is a bit better. Unfortunately, I have no interest in that series.
@HyugaX, I agree that a slipcase would be pretty nice. MG’s Ef hardcopy release was really nice. I don’t mind the big box, I just don’t want all that useless space on the inside. They should add more goodies to fill up the space at the very least.
Your voice was fine, and you shed some light on a few things like people have mentioned. When it can come to problems with dealing with companies and things outside your control like the VA prices. I think saturation could be a problem on steam and getting a game noticed could become lot more difficult. But you could also bring in a new audience base.
Depending on the company they usually have sales on stuff after time, more so with the DL. You also have games that are shorter length in the 3,000yen, then you have some around 5,900 yen. So it depends on the title.
I've got my order for Raidy down since I do enjoy the style of the game and a light dungeon crawl.
I would say if the LE are gonna be a premium product for fans adding content in is a nice thing. You could do a price draw lottery for high appeal games. A give away for a exclusive item related to the game, like a signed drawing or something exclusive from the development team on a first run or a pre-order through J-list exclusive, something which your third party sellers wouldn't have.
It'd be amusing to have a Kickstarter-like promotion for a preorder. The game would be guaranteed to come out; the draw would be the preorder goodies. Imagine several tiers of goodies with different price points. As the number of "funders" increases, new tiers would unlock allowing people to pay more for even more goodies. If you bid into a higher tier than ended up getting funded, your "bid" would be automatically reduced to the highest funded tier. I think this would draw out all the crazy collectors and give rabid fans some incentive to get people excited about the game. Obviously this would only work for a game people really cared about.
The cockblock is, most kickstarter projects of an adult nature are canned right away by Kickstarter.
Couldn't you set J-List up to do something like this though? It'd just be a typical preorder with like 8 different versions a user could select from, and the credit card would be charged at the end of the promotion rather than right before the game ships.
@ Peter Payne
"The cockblock is, most kickstarter projects of an adult nature are canned right away by Kickstarter."
Well there's always the route Sekai took with Grisaia keeping the campaign all-ages until the very end and later on letting people switch their pledges around to the adult after version using BackerKit. Not sure if that may jeopardize future KS projects for them but its been done before.
Also with your online infrastrucure in place you wouldn't even have to use such an overt ruse. You could just add a DLC card to each copy of the game that is redeemable for a DRM-free copy of either the adult or all-ages version on your website (same as your doing with your current LEs).
"It'd be amusing to have a Kickstarter-like promotion for a preorder."
I suggested this before and I think it can work well by bringing fans a game they want and getting your company additional name recognition. For this to work though the title you pick needs to be too big to ignore (to ensure full press coverage), something like Mahoutsukai no Yoru, and you need to explain why you're using crowd funding (VA mafia) for the title so it doesn't look like your using the campaign as a ploy for attention.
I think J-List already has the infrastructure in place for such a campaign all you need is the title and the parent company's blessings.
Looking at both approaches, KS is the safer route while using J-List is more risky but if you use J-List you're bringing tons of potential new customers right to your store's doorstep.
To be fair, Clannad had a wildly popular anime and Grisaia’s fan translation was very well received. A lot of people knew what those two series were going into the Kickstarters. Grisaia even had an anime adaptation around the time of the Kickstarter. MangaGamer’s fundraiser is sort of buried. You have to actually dig around to find it. It’s also based on the sales of other games. It’s not a great premise.
I like the Kickstarter route because you see the interest before committing completely. It’s also great for drumming up hype. Sekai did a fine job with the Clannad KS. Their Grisaia KS is a good model to follow. An all-ages campaign with the promise of an adult version afterwards is a nice route. Just try have a solid plan in place as well as green-lights if you do stretch goals for other platforms like the PS Vita. It’s been months since the end of the KS and there’s still be no real progress on that front for the Grisaia KS. That was well as my dislike for a few other things Sekai did for the Grisaia KS resulted in me refunding my hardcopy pledge. Anyway, their model is a good model to follow. Just manage it better.