MangaGamer takes Suggestions!

Visual Novel Community Archive, 2000-2009
#1

Yesterday I sent a suggestion to MangaGamer about translating a certain game. Today I received a reply and in it they mentioned that should they get funds they may attempt to make it happen.

I’m not sure if they are just saying this, but I’m mentioning it anyway that they may take suggestions on titles to translate.

Also, within their reply they mention they currently have a limited budget…

For anyone wondering what game i suggested it was ‘Nikutai Teni’ by “Silky’s”. Since they seem to be translated sex-fest titles this one happens to be my favourite…

#2

They have limited funds? Not a good sign. They’d better get their act together soon … Although it actually looks like they might, which is a pleasant surprise.

#3

If my guess is correct, they’re already operating on a loss. MG spent $$$ to acquire these licenses and perform all the various knickknacks to get themselves ready. Then they release their titles, but on a substandard translation quality. I have no idea what their sales look like, but I assume it’s not as high as it could have been, as negative remarks about their subpar work has made its rounds on the Internets. So they’re not maximizing sales. To solve this problem, MG is hiring proofreaders and translators. That’s also costing them $$$ - and more importantly, time (which is money not being earned).

So MG is trying their damn best to keep their customers happy. I’m thinking that the next round of games will determine if they sink or float. More importantly: will enough of them be sold to counterbalance the losses they’ve incurred so far and make a profit. So if the next round of games are great translations, it would behoove the ero community to buy as many of them as they can. They’re going out on a limb. It would also prove that translation quality is important to make bestsellers.

#4

Doubt it. They may pick up a few more sales when people learn they’re translated better, but lack of resellers and high prices, especially for downloadable only games, are hurting them.

#5

We already pay high prices for games though… $90 a pop unless you live in Japan and/or know someone who does. :expressionless:

MG is charging about $92 for a digital copy of Da Capo that’s translated into English and uncensored. Himeya Shop will charge you $99 if you try to special order it from them. That’s not including the insane shipping costs. It’s a hard copy, true, but it’s in Japanese with censorship. Which is more useful to an English gamer who wants to try eroge? For people like me, who travel to Japan regularly and is fluent in the language, no big deal. Getting MG games is a lost for us. But for the American/Canadian/European guy who doesn’t know a lick of Japanese outside of “kawaii” and can’t fly to the Land of the Rising Sun?

People here keep claiming they want PP to grab big name titles, but the companies that own these big name titles charge big name prices. You’re gonna have to pay it, if you want them. If you want Clannad, then you’re gonna pay Clannad prices. That’s not MG’s fault. What is MG’s fault is shitty translation. Evidently the digital thing isn’t anything they can control ¬ñ the original Japanese studios don’t want hardcopies in the West: but MG is fixing the translation issue… so that ends all the reasonable things they can directly fix.

My beef with MG was the translation. That’s really it. I can understand the pricing, and I now realize they have no control over the hard copy thing. MG has done everything they can, and apparently are operating on a loss. What happens to them now, is the customer’s fault.

This is all reminding me of Xenosaga - Namco gave the dev team ALL the funding needed to make that game. At the time, it might have been one of the most expensive games ever made. Reviews for it were always 10’s and 100% for it - so the game was great. It was the customers who didn’t buy Xenosaga, that killed it. The second and third releases were crap, because the Namco investors only saw a lemon. If MG releases quality products, and they still sink, I’m gonna go with OLF on this… it’s the fan’s fault for letting it happen. Maybe the West isn’t ready for top-of-the-line licenses. Due to what they did, I have ZERO pity for Xenosaga fans…

No insult on PP or anything - they’ve got some great titles in the works (Princess Waltz especially) ¬ñ but Westerns keep demanding for the expensive stuff. MG appears to be one of the best shots at that happening. Eroge is not a cheap hobby in Japan. PP has been spoiling the hell outta you guys. Peter and the gang should be REALLY thanked for that. But not everyone works on that model - nor can all the games you want, be imported to the West this way. For all we know, maybe MG has connections with Illusion or Leaf. Won’t know if they bomb out.

#6

MG’s prices are in euro, not pounds. 50 euro is about $74 (and dropping).

Wait, what? From what I hear, Xenosaga III is almost unanimously considered the best game of the series.

#7

To throw in my two cents on a different issue - Although there’s certainly a bit of debate about the ethics of fan-translations of eroge etc., I don’t think it would be a good idea for MangaGamer to license titles like Fate/Stay Night, Utawarerumono, ONE etc. Probably 80% of the people interested in playing them in English will have already done so via high quality fan-translations, so they’d be unlikely to sell well, and they could alienate the fanbase (unless people really want to fap to uncensored mana-transfer scenes :roll:).

I haven’t been interested in the three MangaGamer titles so far, but I’ll definitely purchase Suika A.S+ as the final product looks like it will be of a much higher quality than any of their earlier releases.

#8

Ah… you’re right… I don’t know why I used pounds. Actually I do know why I was using Pounds, but its something totally off topic and related to another discussion on a different forum. :oops: In any case, it just furthers my thoughts more. MG is cheaper than the Japanese alternative, despite the complaints about high price.

Xenosaga as a whole, is a MASSIVE commercial failure. That’s why Xenosaga isn’t getting a #4 thru #6, and why Namco sold the studio (Monolith) to Nintendo at dirt cheap stock sales. Xenosaga is praised by gamers, but cursed and spit on by investors: you don’t buy, they won’t fund. Game developers either shake their heads in pity about the situation (it was the perfect game), or laugh in ridicule (investors were idiots to put their faith in a perfect game making profit).

#9

Well, here’s my take. I’m learning Japanese in large part specifically because I’m losing patience with the US market. I have an enormous stack of games which I am currently working thru as a backlog. It is very common for me to buy games and not play them for like a year, or more.

In large part, this – and unsung classics like Planescape: Torment (a game which is from a now-dead company, released for a now-dead product line, that is now owned by new owners who want the old stuff buried) – that motivate the ten-year rule.

There’s no point in my even considering a game that requires activation. In a year, these yoyos will be dead (most likely). Then I’m just out good money for nothing. And frankly, since the companies know that it does nothing, and choose to employ such a mechanism anyway, they have succeeded only in alienating me.

#10

You know someone in the ero community will just crack the DRM in that scenario, and without an active company to challenge that piracy, there won’t be any legal teeth to stop them. Hell… the games have ALREADY been cracked. I don’t seem the DRM as an issue anymore. It’s not a problem if MG is active, and it won’t be a problem if MG is inactive thanks to Google. That MG has to fight this kind of war, isn’t their fault at all. The DRM isn’t their idea - it was the deal they had to make, to get these games translated into English.

Honestly I’m on the fence with this. I’ll support MG if they release game I like, and the translations are good, but if they fail or die has no real bearing on me in the long run. It will however, give me no pity on the ero community when awesome titles aren’t officially translated or released in the West, and overlooked by the fansub community: Gore Screaming Show or Draculius for example.

#11

Xenosaga is not praised by me. XS3 is, but XS1 and 2 have serious problems. Interestingly enough, Psychonauts is another game that’s really great, but doesn’t meet with critical success. I think I have got it nailed down: Fundamentals. The basic gameplay in both is wanting in certain areas. I’ll leave Psychonauts out of it for now (it’s late, I’m tired).

While XS1 and XS2 are both signifcant improvements over the severe issues Xenogears had, but they had other issues. The Xenosaga series only got good once they booted the creator off the project; that IS NOT a good thing. The entire Xenosaga series combined is about as large in scope as Xenogears. But the entire reason XG has its reputation is the massive scope – XG has dire need of an editor, and the hideous battle system is just … vile. Losing that massive scope is the single biggest thing wrong with Xenosaga. Perhaps if the creator had taken all the money spent on the gorgeous cutscenes for 1 and instead spent it on lengthening the game, that wouldn’t have been such an issue.

Then there’s the combat engine, which in both 1 and 2 is very trying. 2 hardly needs description, so I won’t – other than to say I hated the battle system because it always took forever for every fight. 1’s problems are deeper: the system is fundamentally just broken. It’s entirely unbalanced, so that deathblows are hands down the way to go and you simply upgrade any one you plan on using to use it every round. Attack magic is useless, making characters centered around it also weak – you spend MP to do LESS DAMAGE than you would with your deathblow. That’s just stupid. The entire AGWS mechanic needed a total rethink – which they ended up giving it.

I know plenty of people who think Xenosaga sucks actually on its own merits. Gorgeous does not a good game make. Even a good plot does not a good game make, if you have to wait until the third $50 purchase in order to see it. And the plot of this third installment only makes sense if you read religiously the encyclopedia! Far too much is simply left unexplained in-game, having to wait until you have control in order to go into the menu and read up on whatever-it-is-that-just-happened actually MEANS … no, it’s not good. It hurts the product.

#12

My criticism is actually levelled at the licensing companies. If they don’t give me a no-activation-required disc, right now, my inclination is … screw the english release. Maybe I’ll get the Japanese edition later on, maybe, once I can actually read it. Especially if they’re going to charge that much. Or maybe I will just wait and see; after all, if the game’s going to wait around for a year behind a dozen other games anyway, I could just buy shortly before I actually plan on playing it. Or I could just not buy it at all.

#13

XS3 bombed harder than XS1… it really doesn’t matter which individual game was best or which was worst: Namco was going to shovel it after the first title. Only contract binding forced them to create a second and third. If I were giving a seminar on “worst games ever made” to a class of developers, the Xenosaga series as a whole would easily be in the top three. Xenosaga is not a failure because of the developers - its a failure because of the customers. That makes it a textbook perfect example, of why cash cowing and creating shovelware is more profitable.

And that might be why companies like Illusion say, “screw an English release.” They feel the same way, only from their prospective. Hence me not having any pity, if such companies refuse to release titles in English.

#14

Yeah, because a lot of people bailed after the first was kind of a let down. More bailed after the second game managed to be even worse. I almost wasn’t even gonna bother, until I saw XS3 had already gotten cheap.

If hordes of people aren’t buying something, you have to ask why. Blaming the customers for “not buying quality” because they “don’t get it” doesn’t help. Psychonauts almost sank Majesco; Xenosaga sank Monolith. Planescape: Torment was made by some of the most impeccably credentialed names in PC RPGs, yet it bombed. Surely the answer is not to continually blame the public.

#15

Xenosaga sank Monolith because no one bought it. There is not additional reason why. Customers failed them: that’s the verdict.

Xenosaga had high production value. Xenosaga earned maximum ratings from reviewers and gamers alike. The title wasn’t absolutely perfect - nothing made by humans is that good - but Xenosaga was the nearest thing to perfect that was possible for an RPG at that time. That was the whole point of the project: to make the ultimate game where time and money were not an object. There was no cut content. There were no budgets sliced. Xenosaga is what gamers wanted. It’s what gamers kept crying for. They got it. They didn’t want it.

It can be the customer’s fault. That quote, “the customer is never wrong” is a farce. The customer can be wrong. The business world proves it on a regular basis. I don’t know about Planescape (I’ve done a little research on that title, and the failures for it are related to something else), but Psychonauts is another good example of consumer failure in the console market. The developers gave the customers what they wanted: it was the customers who failed to recover the investment to the developers.

You don’t want to blame the customers? Fine then. Then the mistake is this: Xenosaga and Psychonauts should have never been developed to begin with. The entire concept of them is a failure. They’re so good, they suck. Which is ultimately what I told people who I worked with and supervised. Had they never been made, the respective companies would have never lost profit. The mistake is TRUSTING that people would buy them. Don’t worry: they won’t make that mistake again. Sucks to be a Xenosaga fan - or hoping that companies will let developers work on something, without a guillotine to cut them down.

#16

I feel sorry for MangaGamer. The game publishers and fans have stuck them between a rock (DRM, no hard copies) and a hard place (the many fans who take issue with the “rock” and vote with their money).

#17

Nagrakhan’s previous point pretty much hits the issue right on the head… why invest in a venture no one is willing to pay for? I agree that DRM is an evil evil tool of the Devil but that’s what the current environment MG has to deal with.

Lets face it licensing for those “big” games everyone wants is huge (your paying for the name of not ONLY the game but an entire franchise w/ a game like say To Heart - your grabbing the rights for a game series, an anime series and soundtracks) those are very profitable investments and they want returns on those… why bother trying to sell the game when a licensed anime is already raking in cash (along with any other merchandise and cd’s) and then sink cash on a questionable venture of licensing eroge… fact of the matter is a HUGE chunk of eroge “fans” will never buy a copy and pirate the game and never even pay a cent to the publishers… i mean for everyone one person i see in these boards there will HUNDREDS of others on any other site just leeching the game for free and then demanding “better games” =/ And you wonder why their placing draconian tactics on their titles?.. if a relatively low key (to western audiences) game gets pirated to this extent. Can you imagine even more so the loss on an unprotected “popular” title like FSN or Kanon?

Being stuck in AU gives me a very very good perspective on Nagrakhans point… can you people even care to guess how many games just never ever make it over here because “its not popular enough to be ported over”… i will mention Xenosaga 2 and Parasite Eve 2 as an example… not because they didn’t make it here… but because their previous versions never saw the light of day as they were considered “not profitable”. Bottom line is if no one will BUY the game no one will license the game.

#18

Actually from what I’ve heard, when they were working on XS2, a lot of plot details in the original draft of the script were changed due to the fact that the lead scenario designer left the Xenosaga team before the game was completed.

Not to mention when Namco localized XS3 for release here, they removed all the blood from the violent cutscenes. I can’t really speak for the other two games, but not many fans were particularly happy about how they censored the game, considering the fact that there are lots and lots of cutscenes in each of the installments in the XS series. Hell, even Gamespot criticized Namco in its XS3 review for doing that.

As far as MG is concerned, the only beef I have with their DRM is that it’s based on the number of times you install the game, not download it. I have to reinstall my comp almost every year: What the hell am I going to do once I’ve used up my 5 installs? I mean, I downloaded My classmate is a sex slave and I’ve only got 3 tries left thanks to the fact that my comp got crashed by that damn CWS spyware. I mean, if the Japanese companies require a DRM, that’s fine by me. However, I highly doubt that they specifically stated that MG needed to use this type of DRM in particular, but rather they just told them that they needed some sort of DRM protection system in order to sell their games. I wouldn’t be surprised if MG chose to use this particular DRM scheme themselves. It’d be much better if they could implement a V-Mate style system that requires the player to be signed in online, while the only limit being the amout of time you download instead of install.

#19

Double post… sorry about that…

#20

You overlooked my specific naming or you misunderstood me… That’s why I said: “Namco was going to shovel it after the first title. Only contract binding forced them to create a second and third.”

Xenosaga - the original, the first - there was no cut content. There was no limited budget. There were no “overseers” to keep the developers in line with the investor’s desires. Xenosaga failed. The investors were obviously pissed. However they were contractually bound to create more than one, but they’d be damned if the “failure developers” got to be in charge again. So when development of XS2 began, the investors took the reins. There was cut content. There was a limited budget. There were multiple overseers to control the developers. That’s when many members of the original development team walked out (including the lead scenario designer). They didn’t like this; they were used to having total control. Namco really didn’t give hoot - and weren’t bothered when these people left: less complaining and resistance. XS3 was the same. When the contract was over, Namco sold the remnants and assets of Monolith to Nintendo so they could clean their hands of it once and for all.

It really didn’t matter what the fans thought after the first Xenosaga: investors didn’t really care about them at that point, because the “fans” didn’t justify them caring. The entire venture was a lemon from the first title. The series as a whole actually sold better in the US than it did in Japan, but the company had their fill, and were just glad it something could be salvage in profit. If there’s any good news from the entire Xenosaga fiasco, it’s that Namco looks at the US in a better light, in terms of being able to sell things. Hasn’t convinced them to bother with an English version of iDOLM@STER though.

Narg does his homework… sorta his job. :wink:

There is one interesting footnote I should add: Namco still holds the IP to Xenosaga. This was not sold to Nintendo. Some say its because Namco wants to try the “Xeno-verse” again. I actually believe its because the investors have a grudge with the developers, and by retaining the IP, the original creators can’t get it back or take it to another studio (like they did when they left Squaresoft). Can’t say that I blame them… Nothing upsets a game designer more, than when he can’t use his own ideas anymore.

If you contact them, and provide your order number (or email back the receipt), they’ll reset your DRM counter back to zero. I did it as an experiment with a purchase. Did it twice even - for a total of 9 installs - just to see if they’d hassle me about it. Also if you do a full Windows backup of the game folder and its files after getting the DRM activated; performing a Windows restore will return the game with its DRM activated. Same goes for Acronis… or IBM backup… or whatever backup software you use. The DRM isn’t a hidden Registry file or anything ultra secret. Seriously. The DRM is being overblown.