Ah, true. That’s a good point, and there are also only a handful of eroges in this genre (excluding fandiscs/remakes, I can only think of 11 off the top of my head, although there are probably a few more I haven’t come across before).
I think if I try another title it’ll probably be 3 Methods, because of the setting. Futaba Channel, the most recent eroge I played in this genre (bought it off 999 when it was discounted), was fairly predictable and not particularly well written. The biggest problem though, was the completely linear storyline when the game would have benefited from decision points/branching/multiple endings.
crowd locked me out this is what i get when i try to access the page
You don’t have permission to access /crowd/top.html on this server.
most of the sites the crowd operates are being block
Perhaps, but fandiscs are inherently a lot cheaper than the original games they are based on due to the vast amounts of assets that can be reused. Tachie (the character sprites), backgrounds, music etc. can all be reused, the original character designs can be reused and these things comprise of a substantial amount of the cost of any game. That said, previous CROWD fandiscs have been typically around the standard 6800? mark so it seems likely they would at least produce something on par with the original game here.
Yep, and the collection of short stories part is also fairly worrying - Oretsuba’s fandisc was full price, and seems to have had twice as many stories as this, but the playtimes speak for themselves. I can’t recall coming across a full-price fandisc, that offered an ‘full price’ amount of content (maybe Dive X might be an exception). I guess one advantage mid-price fandiscs have is the lack of competition in that price range. Once you get to full price, it’s up against 20+ other eroges in that month, as well as the general ‘original > to >>>> fandisc’ rule (unless there’s something fundamentally wrong with the original that the fandisc rectifies) which would probably have a fairly significant effect on sales.
Yes. I agree that it’s too pricey. However I am not surprised they are charging that much.
#1:Greed.
#2: If they can get away with charging that much - fans are gullible to pay that much - then they can start charging full price on a regular basis.
#3:Greed.
Personally, I’ve occasionally felt that the 9800-ish yen price tag that eroge has always been costing - since the 1980’s - was artificially inflated.
Yes, they don’t sell as many units as the mainstream console market, but hasn’t the price of eroge production gone down with newer software and game design techniques? Usually - when the price of manufacturing a product goes down - the businesses lower the price for it: the savings are passed to the customer. Of course that’s not from the kindness of their hearts: it’s so they can crush the competition.
My contention as always been: does an eroge really have to cost 9800 yen per copy, for the studio to recover their investment and still turn a profit? I know that there was a little snit during the 1990’s, when certain studio were charging something like 6800 yen per copy - using the lower price to appeal to prospective buyers. Didn’t seem to work too well though…
No one knows though, because eroge companies aren’t mandated to publish their earnings to the public like console game companies.
Hmm, I would disagree on that point. Of everything I understand about this, 9240? is a good price point precisely because it is what people are willing to pay. Now, there’s no question that any title that does well will do quite nicely out of that 9240? price tag… not just companies like AUGUST that can sell over 100K, but even the smaller companies can do well enough out of it even when they’re just starting out and can’t afford to make something spectacular, if the story and characters are just that good.
However, the 9240? price tag is more important when the eroges DON’T do so well, as the majority of those released every year do - even if your eroge doesn’t sell, you may still be able to break even on it; and even if you don’t, you can maintain a buffer from previous sales. I think the 9240? pricetag makes sense in a very niche market that is not going to expand enough if you lower the price. If eroge became cheaper, I genuinely believe that the overall quality of it would suffer, and saving $20 or so per title is not enough to justify that loss, to me.
Eroge still cost a pretty reasonable amount of money to produce-- likely quite a bit more than saaay NDS games that aren’t sold that much cheaper, sell FAR more copies and also have a very lucrative overseas market. Programming for NDS games is of course more expensive, but programmers are cheap. Top-class voice-actors spending weeks in a recording studio voicing your game? The artists and colourers that spend days zoomed in in Photoshop creating the consistent high quality that the market demands (whereas, for an NDS game, you could probably get away with one person churning out low-poly models or pixel art sprites every half hour)? The scenario writers, the good ones which (rightfully) demand a pretty penny for their work that the market demands, whereas your NDS game could probably have pretty much anyone writing it (who are the scenario writers behind Love Plus? I know their names, but what are their previous works? Certainly nothing noted for strong scenario writing)? Eroge costs money to produce- it may not be as MUCH money as works in other mediums, but it costs quite a bit of money and needs to get that back somehow.
Agreed. The pricetag isn’t too much of a problem, as games tend to drop in price fairly quickly afterwards, so if you’re prepared to wait a little while for something that’s not too much of an issue. As Lancer-X also mentioned, as well as making it relatively easy for companies to break into the industry, it also allows for established companies to spend a lot of time/money on an eroge in order to create something really epic, and although some just crank out the same thing over and over, knowing that it’ll sell x number of copies regardless (generally because of the artist), I think a lot of the top companies have pride in what they do, and do put some serious effort into making their eroges as good as they can be, even with features they could otherwise have cut corners on.
I guess as a recent example, Applique’s Tasogare no Sinsemilla (highly recommended), in addition to being rather long (2.4 mb of raw text, that I’m sure took me at least 30, if not 35 hours to read, so as a form of entertainment the value for money certainly compares favourably to a lot of other things), has several smaller features, that probably wouldn’t have any effect on the overall sales, and are completely irrelevant as far as the overall story is concerned (eg. including short 45-90 minute routes for all of the sub-heroines, flowchart, which eliminates the need to save/load), but at the same time are just nice to have in there.
