@WhiteWolven
No it doesn’t appear so. You can find the endings explained in detail here: Endings | School Days Wiki | Fandom
Another site: 誠也の部屋【SHINY DAYS 攻略】
Though I have to warn you there are a ton of spoilers.
@John Smith: Wow so many endings and different types of hentai in this Vn and no incest between him and his mom? LoL, ah well. Still a bit surprising, but I'll enjoy this game none the less.
@WhiteWolven
cuz his mom like his little sister are too pure
"Without proper marketing these titles won’t live up to their sales potential."
I still don’t get why you think this title would sell well. It never sold well enough for Overflow to afford to keep making them. And that was when they pretty much had total market share since I can’t remember any other company making animated VNs. Well, potentially the 3D game market would be closer to animation levels of Overflow these last few years.
It is better to make regular VNs with Live2D and such to animate the characters. Cheaper and more customer oriented since people want classic style VNs.
Those of you who are already fans should enjoy your game though. It was literally made for you.
"And that was when they pretty much had total market share since I can't remember any other company making animated VNs."
There were a few:
https://vndb.org/g1487
Decay comments on the delay of Shiny Days and his growing disenchantment with JAST USA in Fuwanovel's popular VNTS update.
"Today, I'm pretty frustrated. I'm not necessarily angry, but tired and disappointed. On the day of this writing, the 18th of September, we were met with a "surprise." That being JAST USA's delay of Shiny Days from September 18th to September 30th, digital version on the 25th. I'm disappointed because this isn't really much of a surprise at all, it's something we have come to expect from JAST. I'm tired because this keeps happening, it has happened twice now with Shiny Days, it has happened with Starless, it happened with Hanachirasu, it happened with Romanesque, it just keeps happening over and over again with everything JAST releases. And it's frustrating because they waited until the last possible moment, yet again, to inform us. They want us to be understanding. It's beyond their control, they say. There's only "2.5" of them, I guess. They have their hands full with a website relaunch. The game is just too big for them to easily work with and create an installer for. There's a whole slate of excuses they want to serve us, but should we really be understanding and accepting of this?
I don't actually understand. JAST has been doing this for a very long time now. 18 years, in fact. They've worked with disc printers and have had physical game launches dozens of times. They're familiar with how their partners in physical goods manufacturing operate, they know the ranges of delays possible for them, they should have a better idea of the timeframes they're working with, and they're capable of communicating this to us more clearly. I don't get how they didn't anticipate ahead of time a 16GB web download being a problem for them, when they've had all the time in the world to deal with this issue before it became an issue. There is also virtually no way that they shouldn't know until today that they wouldn't be able to ship the game out until 12 days later. I'm trying to work out in my mind how that makes sense, but I'm sorry to say that I can't. I can't actually understand how any of these problems are taking JAST by surprise.
There's also the problem of how this affects Seinarukana. This was ostensibly slated for a September release. Not long ago I got a somewhat solid word that this was still on the books. I wasn't fully sold, but stranger things have happened. But now with this delay, surely Seinarukana is affected as well. I don't know the intimate details of how JAST operates, but I'm assuming they only have one partner for physical goods assembly and shipping, and right now all hands are on deck for Shiny Days. Even if everything was ready to go for Seinarukana, they will have to wait for Shiny Days to ship off before starting on that. So at the very least, we can rule off a possible September release for Seinarukana, and maybe October is starting to look like a pipe dream. At least this may finally give them an opportunity to actually market that game, which they weren't willing to do before. But it almost seems like they just want to ship that one off to die before recouping what little funds it can with no further budget allocated to it.
JAST will tell us all that all of this is beyond their control. But the most frustrating part is that an awful lot of it is indeed within their control, and it us who have no control. We're hapless as JAST takes us on yet another rollercoaster of hype and disappointment, and I think I'm ready to get off this ride. Chalk up one more casualty of the chronic JAST delays."
@sanahtlig Thanks for sharing that with me. I agree with that comment soo much.
A few more titles than I was aware of, but some of them were not part of what I was talking about, namely the 3D animations.
A few of them actually looked like they stuck with the regular VN design text boxes, so those were probably not fully animated. (But is probably selling better than fully animated VNs)
Would have been nice if someone localized that Sisters game though. Sounds a lot better than Shiny Days.
Animation isn't the only appeal of the School Days series. The games have a really well-developed setting, a cast of entertaining characters, and semi-realistic teen drama that's immersive and enjoyable. The satire of typical VN and anime tropes is refreshing. There's a few other interactive movies listed on VNDB, but those titles don't really interest me.
The pseudo-animation in titles like Nekopara and Monobeno is neat but it's not the same at all. Playing School Days is like playing an interactive anime. The scenes themselves have a sense of movement. Simply moving sprites around the screen doesn't capture that.
@Linus Gustavsson Eh... I don't know about the Sisters game. The only reason I would actually play that is to fap and if I have a incest fetish. From what I heard, the story is linear and the game itself is very short so, you're pretty much playing it to fap considering that majority of the time are h scenes. But its quite different for shiny days. You get a huge cast of characters, over 30+ endings to choose from, the h scenes of course, and nice story. All those already are alot more appealing unless you're just looking to fap and thats it.
It is still a niche title on account of being an interactive anime. And I’m only saying this to point out that I do not think it needs extra marketing. Fans will most likely already be aware of it.
And if someone isn’t a fan, they are most likely not in any hurry to pre-order it but will maybe check it out later. Which is plenty of time for word of mouth to reach them.
Though it needs to be good word of mouth I guess. Nice boat meme made me put the School Days title in the category of games that are least interesting.
"It is still a niche title on account of being an interactive anime."
I think you're confused. VNs are niche titles. School Days is the sort of title that has mainstream appeal. That's why it was JAST's bestseller for a while. VNs are a hard sell to people who aren't already fans. But interactive movies? A lot of people can dig that. The problem is the anime adaptation was kind of bad, the game is priced out of the range of window shoppers, and people just don't KNOW about the game because JAST's marketing sucks. I marketed the game to Sakura series casuals on Steam and an amazing proportion of my visitors checked the game out. There's a ton of interest in games like School Days--it's just that JAST doesn't know how to capitalize on it.
You are too much a fan of this game to think logically.
Just because someone doesn’t pre-order, does not mean they won’t buy the game. You can’t count your linkings success instantly but have to give it time. Not everyone likes to pay for a game before they’ve heard about translation quality, content etc. from people who played it before them. Overall you can’t judge marketing success until months after the release.
And even then you can only tell if marketing was bad if you perform good marketing and get a spike in sales. If sales don’t spike, it just means marketing still sucks or the game has sold to everyone who actually wanted it.
I for one even if I was a fan would wait with buying until I’ve seen the unofficial patch in action.
@sanahtlig First things first though, if you're going to market your product you should at least be able to make the release date.....
"Just because someone doesn't pre-order, does not mean they won't buy the game. You can't count your linkings success instantly but have to give it time. Not everyone likes to pay for a game before they've heard about translation quality, content etc. from people who played it before them. Overall you can't judge marketing success until months after the release."
You're trying to interpret my data without understanding how it was collected or what it represents.
I think JAST needs to hire more people and/or re-look its division of labor as far as who does what and leverage fan involvement for tasks such as beta testing and script checking. I'm not an insider but I'm sure that there's something to be learned by looking at how MG operates. At this point in time JAST would do well in imitating their MO until both companies are on par.
Beyond imitating MG I'd also recommend releasing past titles on steam which is something we've talked about but nothing has been announced yet (likely due to JAST's limited staff). Looking at MG success with Higurashi on Steam it may make sense to split up games like Demonbane into smaller pieces with a phased release schedule for the Steam release.
Steam doesn’t accept that kind of games. However if they actually put work into turning it all-ages and then made an unofficial patch, then it would work. But I’m not sure JAST is looking for more work on old titles just to sell more of them. Work hours cost money as we all know.
Splitting a game would also require porting to a new engine so you can run it episodic and conserve your choices in earlier titles to affect your choices later in the later titles. Depending on title of course, since some do not use the point based system but just a fork choice system.
Not to mention it is hard to actually cut off a game so that all routes end on an equally worthwhile cliffhanger. You don’t want a game ending with something boring like “See you tomorrow!”.
Cutting a game like Shiny Days into multiple episodic releases sounds like it might be trivial but I bet that it would actually be a much more expensive job than some people are imagining. You can't just cut and paste some code over and call it a day, there are a lot of challenges JAST would face and it might not be feasible.
Without innovation the eroge market is going to remain stagnant and isolated. The success of titles like the Sakura series (especially the spike in sales when they released an ero version) shows that the latent demand is there. JAST and others need to find a way to tap this demand, or they're going to be left behind. The quality of the product alone is not enough to sell it.
Episodic releases are one step towards meeting consumer demand in the age of Steam gaming. Innovation comes with risks and costs. But there's opportunity costs to NOT innovating as well. MangaGamer is recognizing that selling feature-length titles at $45+ misses a key segment of demand, and they're responding by trying out episodic releases. JAST can wait to see whether MG's venture succeeds (and get left behind if it does), or they can do their own experiments.
I'm here to say that casual buyers ARE interested in games like School Days and Shiny Days. VERY interested. But something about the J-List shop page is turning them away. I don't know what that is for sure, but my guess is the sticker price. If JAST could find a way to cut that down to $10 or so (such as episodic releases), I think they'd see interest from a broad customer base they never knew existed. Customers aren't going to change their habits to fit a business model. The business has to change their model to fit customer habits.
Discount sales (games costing 10 dollars or less) are not games sold because the buyers are VERY interested but because they are moderately interested and the price makes it affordable to buy now and play in 5 years.
Full price games on the other hand is better to wait those 5 years and buy later, since they may become discount sales (closer to 10 dollars) over the course of years. Unless you are VERY interested, at which point you buy it for full price now.
I own all Sakura games. I have played none. I’m currently playing One Piece, which I bought for full price. I’ve also pre-ordered last Starcraft 2, which I will be playing as well. I also bought the JAST bundle and have installed zero games so far.
I do not claim everyone is like me, but I suspect a lot are. Those who aren’t like me are pretty impressive with their 100+ games bought from Steam AND played through all.