I swear there was a previous thread about their precipitous plunge, but I can’t find it. So here: http://www.siliconera.com/2011/05/13/ni … s-profits/
2.85M is not a huge amount of profit, but it is a lot better than what they were doing before. Good to hear their strategy is paying off; NIS America is now where Atlus was ten years ago, and it’d be a shame for them to go under.
Glances at my Atelier Rorona, Hyperdimension Neptunia, and Ar Tonelico Qoga.
Yeah, no wonder why. They finally bring the games I want.
Tho, what is the strategy you’re talking about that Nis America is using? Never heard of it.
We’re also getting Atelier Totori later this year so let’s pray for their continued success (and hope they can sweet talk Sony into letting us have more Sakura Taisen)
Was in their financial reports last year. Basically it was:
#1: Stop licensing other company’s games for Western localization.
#2: Reduce the number of games being released each quarter.
#3: Reduce the amount of money spent on game development.
#4: Reduce the amount of money invested in “non-game” merchandise (figurines, artbooks, soundtracks, etc).
#5: Release non-vital people from employment.
Not necessarily in that order mind you.
Ok thanks and Totori huh.
Nice, it really feels weird to actually try pay attention to game news after almost a decade of not paying attention at all. Its hard.
Unfortunately, I find this unlikely. The PS2 is beyond dead now. Releasing a PS2 game at this point would be a waste of money pressing discs nobody’s gonna buy.
We might get the PSP versions of the games, assuming they can get approved and localized before Sony’s next-gen PSP comes out. My money’s not on that though.
While I think the failure of ST5 Wii can be (at least partly) attributed to its lack of Japanese voice, that’s just speculation. It failed, and the take-away (from a publisher’s perspective) is that spending money to create ports of Sakura Taisen games for newer systems is a fools’ errand. Sadly, this means that unless ports for modern systems are created for the Japanese market, the games can’t be released.
Possibly a Virtual Console or PSN download-only release might go through. DDL-only is a promising way for niche titles to get official release that wouldn’t be worth the cost of pressing discs. But I doubt that Sakura Taisen will be the trailblazer for this, given how well it did last time.
The failure of ST5 has guaranteed you won’t see a “dater” on the consoles or handhelds. Not unless someone literally has money to throw away or taking drugs. It’s over. No point in trying. That game was the literal last chance for everything. There is NO market for console/handheld daters in the West. All arguments otherwise, ignore all the facts. Sad but true.
Strings were pulled so the game had more shelf exposure in Gamestop, and was shipped to Walmarts and Best Buys. Didn’t do a damn thing. I gave up my TM4 efforts, because ST5 was the dead end wall that couldn’t be crossed. ST5 had to be a run away success for it to also succeed.
I dunno … in the sufficiently long term, it might gradually evolve in that direction. Hybrids seem to be doing OK. The various Harvest Moon games have done okay, and Persona 3/4 have been the most successful MegaTen games ever. But both of those have pretty hefty RPGs attached to them, and Sakura Taisen is much lighter on those elements. There’s the possibility for hybrid games to gradually become less RPG and more dating sim, and still be successful. Fifteen years ago, RPGs were a pretty crappy market; FF7 changed that.
But ultimately, NIS America rolled the dice on Sakura Taisen - a series that has been in much demand by RPG fans pretty much since the first games came out - and they didn’t quite come up with snake eyes, but it failed. That is going to be a very heavy blow.
There’s the possibility that ST5 was simply too old at this point; or that something about it hampered its appeal. Another of its ilk might be successful where it wasn’t. Problem is, it’s a losing proposition. There’s a track record of crashing and burning, and publishing costs tons of money. Exhaustively trying all the variants of a game that failed in an effort to find the one that will be a hit is a good way to go broke. If something isn’t working, then you go try something that IS working. When sword and sandal epics stopped pulling audiences into the theatres, they went the way of the dodo. Movie studios haven’t tried to resurrect them. Or musicals either.
(Of course, there are exceptions to this. The Conduit recently got a sequel. I’m not entirely sure how, or why.)
Daters… isn’t ar tonelico a bit of dater? U kinda hit on reyvatiels in them.
I seriously doubt it. Both in Europe and NA people expect when playing games to have a decent level of interactivity. RPGs are the only games that can get away with long segments of text and/or video. While its concievable dating sims could do the same, the production value would have to be upped and there would have to be a decent level of gameplay elements to break up the text. While there are a few ideas they could use in more pure-dating sim games, hybrids are probably the only real option. That I don’t see changing.
ST5 probably failed for multiple reasons, not the least of which was that it targeted a niche market to begin with. Others like trying to port it to Wii (and being fiarly buggy from what I heard), being considered the worst by the fanbase, being quite dated for the console it came out on (PS2) by the time it did as well as being released on what had become an essentially dead console, lack of exposure, lack of marketing, used game market (and piracy), etc. While certainly the niche market is a big one, I don’t think it is that niche. However, it may be that niche of people who actually care to support the market.
And adventure games! 
(Yes, I know, all the business analysts will whine that the genre is dead. For a dead genre, it puts out an awful lot of games. They’re simply not big buzz big budget games.)
It’s a good example where the games themselves have gone but the demand has not (even if it’s not as high) - leaving a good niche for smaller companies / independent groups to step in.
Well its dead in that people can’t make money at the standard rate of $40-60 a pop for a new release and the costs of the games to get high-resolution is too costly and time consuming. Some of them try to stick with 320x200 or 320x240, but that’s not a marketable resolution. When was the last time you played a game a new game at that resolution on a PC?
The small handful of super-low-resolution pixel art adventures is only a tiny fraction of the current commercial adventure game market - they’re a more recent thing afaik, with a few oldschool fans reacting to how little pixel art there had BEEN in commercial adventures for years and years and years and deciding to try and revive it.
It’s been far more common to see games at ‘normal’ resolution with a lot of 3d-rendered art selling new at walmart for $20.
Again the price point though. It’s good for consumers who want those games, but not for the industry. They want games that can compete with, if not Final Fantasy and Call of Duty, at least sell easily 100k quickly when placed next to them consistently. Except for remakes of popular games, I’m not sure they can.
Also some of those “normal” resolution artwork still looks bad when compared to most of the $40-60 games. Not all, but enough that it would make people wary about the competency of the genre.
Ah, glad NIS is surviving, I’ve enjoyed several of their games over the years…
It was too southern sounding (never mind that I’m in a southern area…)! Although the hype made me take a look at it; Always thought it was an odd series, small giant robots; group of girls dancing? (opera?) theater? ; southern accents; I was never convinced to buy it.
Seemed like it was targeted at a niche female audience in my opinion…
Depends on what you define as a dater. Record of Agarest War was an SRPG with “Dater” stuff thrown in (Basically choices in the game that influenced your potential Bride’s love ratings, and out of the 3 who loved you, you got to choose who to marry), did well enough that Aksys Games is releasing Agarest Zero on June 14, 2011.