quote:
Originally posted by Kumiko Kamiyama:
Well, here's the current listing of our Top Three sellers as of this month:
- X-change
- Tokimeki Checkin
- Snow Drop
[/LIST]Interesting...!
So, now the sales for Tokimeki Check-in are beginning to grow?? Hmm, do you think that Tokimeki may surpass the sales number of X-change someday?
quote:
Originally posted by Kumiko Kamiyama:
Well, we always expected Xchange to be outsold and to be the lowest seller, actually, because it is the oldest and shortest game we will offer. We expect all titles to eventually surpass it.
Well, that'll eventually happen when the other titles have been around for as long as X-change... Hmm, X-change came out about a year ago, while Tokimeki came out a little less than a half-year ago... if Tokimeki already has the second place in your list, then that means that it had become quite popular, right?
X-Change is top of the list for a simple reason : Ranma 1/2 is very popular . It has nothing to do with the game’s age, graphics, plots …
Most customers who purchase your games are very likely did not play the games before so how in the world can they know about the game plots, graphics, or age unless they have time to read the various reviews scatter throughout the net, which they don’t.
Also, the name “X-Change” sounds cooler. To tell you the truth “Snow Drop” is a very dull name for a game . As for “Tokimeki Check In”, it sounds a little too Japanese, some people might mistake it for a Japanese language game.
It’s all come down to name recognition and how familiar is the customers with the subject discuss in the game.
The first time I saw an advertisement for X-Change, I thought right away about Ranma 1/2 and how cool it would be to play something like that .
As for Snow Drop, the first thing the customer see, at your website for example, is just some white words with blue border saying Snow Drop . Here look at this page
http://www.peachprincess.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Screen=CTGY&Store_Code=PP&Category_Code=BG
Do you think that would spike my interest? Yeah right.
Also checkout the electronic boutique website (ebworld.com) . They have a nice system where customers can post comments about the games . Instead of asking for people to review your games at various website, you could do something like that.
I don’t really think that’s the reason of X-change being the so far most popular gmae that Peach Princess has released… There may be many rasosn for it being popular… For example some people may only buy it because that the title makes it sounds… kind of nasty . But then, again, there may be many reasons of it being popular.
Oh, and by the way, that adress (ebworld.com) doesn’t seem to be working ^^;;;
Hmm, as much as I check out Electronics Boutique for stuff, I really don’t use it for reviews. (Oh, and http://www.ebworld.com is actually their old address that they link to their new one, which is http://www.ebgames.com. Both seem to be back up now. )
For the most part, there seems to be little middle ground in the comments and they often don’t explain themselves. And sometimes, it’s just plain obvious that people buy the games with certain expectations then rip into the game when they’re disappointed. (I forget which game it was but the comment was “There wasn’t enough combat and it sucked that they put in resource management in there…”)
And to tell you the truth, if PeaPri did have something like that here, well it’s a bit different for a company producing products than a wholesaler. Mainly because those who would put comments on the games would most likely be those of us from the BBS and we’re rather biased towards the games already. And if you didn’t see any negative comments, you’d be suspicious wouldn’t you? Not to mention that it would be in the best interest for PeaPri to only post the most positive reviews and comments on their own website, after all, they’re trying to present the product in the best light and sell them. (When was the last time you ever saw Microsoft post a bad review of their products on their own website?)
Whew, one of my wordy responses. Guess that’s what happens when I get fruit punch instead of coke in the morning…
[This message has been edited by ekylo (edited 01-17-2002).]
No offense, but from reading your posts, I think you are a very narrow minded individual Kumiko . You seems to always think that you are right and basically ignore others’ opinions .
Although you tried to hype it, and I know it is your job to do that, Snow Drop is not that great a game . It has very little interaction between characters . Most of the choices you make are basically “Go to Expert Slope, go to kitchen …” Added to the fact the your sister is included in the cast of “your love interests” almost guarantee that it will not sell well in America .
Water Closet is even worse . That type of game is targeted at a very few sick people who enjoy that stuff . Most American do not like that .
If your business strategy is to try to change the market, to enlighten Americans so they would enjoy these stuffs, you are doomed to fail .
I think there is a Chinese quote that says something like “If you go to a house, you have to follow the rules of that house. And if you go to a country, you have to adapt to that country’s laws” .
Fortunately, Peach Princess is not run by you . New games like Critical Point and Brave Soul clearly indicate that the company is trying to adapt to the Americans’ interest and that is a good thing.
quote:
I think there is a Chinese quote that says something like "If you go to a house, you have to follow the rules of that house. And if you go to a country, you have to adapt to that country's laws" .
actually....i like Snow Drop, it has a really nice fairy taleish story; Im not interested in complicated gameplay
have you even played it scf030?
[This message has been edited by exoarchaeologist (edited 01-18-2002).]
Ho! Harsh words, if I may say so, but you’re wrong on some points…
Besides, something tells me that you may not have played Water Closet nor Snow Drop yourself yet, or haven’t read enough about them yet…
First, about Honami in Snow Drop, you doesn’t get all THAT close, from what I’ve heard… besides, on her part, it’s just that she has a crush on her big brother, and what little sister wouldn’t “look up to” a kind big brother? also, Snow Drop isn’t a hardcore title, but rather a romantic softcore title, and why shouldn’t anyone like that? After all, most people loves romantic films and book, so why shouldn’t they enjoy a romantic game???
And then, Water Closet… It’s, if you think that, not a “hardcore toilet sex title” as you may think that it is, but rather a comedy with some toilet themes… And who haven’t seen comedies with bizarre themes, if I may ask? -_^. So, in short, Water Closet isn’t targeted at “sick” people, it’s rather targeted at people who enjoys comedies, even if it is with “bizarre” themes.
And then,a bout the market… it’s rather most people out there who’re narrow-minded (that’s at least my opinion in this), since they either ignores Peach Princess titles just because they thinks that they are “porn” which they certainly not are. and others ignores Peach Princess titles because that they aren’t the “porn” they except them to be - right now, as Kumiko has explained before, most people who buys Peach Princess games seem to be people who just wants “porn”, and you know what “Porn” means, right? It means lots of sex, but no story - and that’s certainly not what WE wants, right?
If Peach Princess’s games were just about hat - lots of ex, but no story - then most of us would probably not buy their games no matter what, since that’s not the kind of games we wants.
Yes, you could say that some of the games that Peach Princess releases is released because that they seems to be what the english market wants - like Brave Soul - but many of the games that the english market seems to “want” may not be all that good, you know… for example, Brave Soul has a good story, from what I’ve been told, but it’s much like Diablo 2 - lots of pointless monsterkilling where it instead could have been more of a story, instead of just killing the monsters…
We do, of course respect other peoples opinions, but you can’t deny that most of those opinions are quite narrow-minded - just as the english market is now.
Will when the Critical Point will released this line up will be change because this game is good. I will say maybe:
1. Tokimeki-Check In
2. Critical Point
3. Snow Drop.
Maybe some people are not much interested in romantic tales ? I personally liked Snow Drop, it has a ‘warm’ concept and playing a game which involved a ski vacation with snow and everything sounded interesting. I don 't X-Change is popular because it sounds nasty, you can tell that by less sales of WC
Well I debated quite a bit whether I even wanted to get into this arguement. I read this board every day, but I don’t post very often because most the answers I could provide are usually already provided by someone else. I have noticed though while following this board that people who offer suggestions contradictary to what the majority who follow this board think, get ripped into. Its not a common thing, but then again most of the posts on this board are done by the same people. If you read scf030’s first post, he was stating his opinion on why X-change has done better than the rest. He had some valid points, Ranma was popular in the past and the idea may be more interesting to the majority than some of PP’s other titles. Also another point is the title. I do believe that the title can play a significant part, when you write a story, what is the most important part? The title is because if you cannot catch your reader’s interest then the rest of the story will not even matter. You don’t walk into a bookstore and read the back of every book, you look for a title that seems interesting and THEN you read the summary to see if it might be something you would like to read. As far as PP’s titles go Snow Drop is the least interesting title name in my opinion. Lastly, we move onto the idea of posting reviews on this site. While the idea has merit, I think Ekylo is right. Not enough traffic goes through here and most reviews would be done my a small minority and would be misleading. shop.himeya.com has this system in place and in most cases the reviews are useless blather, about 15-20% of them contain useful information. So the system can work to a extent, I have bought 2 games because of the review system at Himeya; Pirate Crown and Giniro -Silver-. Also aside from the topic on hand I was pleased with both of those games.
The point of all this is that I feel scf030 made a few decent points and Kumiko shot him down pretty harshly. Kumiko you tend to always go into lengthy explanations when someone disagrees with you. In some cases that is the correct approach, but in others you appear to be looking down on someone’s “lack of apparent knowledge”. In this case I felt you didn’t seriously consider scf030’s comments, you just said that they were wrong. scf030’s response to your post was pretty arrogant and was definitely the wrong way to go about it. But look at the following posts exoarchaeologist and Spectator Beholder basically leap into defend you and both of them question whether scf030 has even played the game, which is basically calling him a liar. Then you yourself openly criticize him with a post which I feel should have at that point went to private email messaging. I am not going to tell anyone how to run their business/board. You may think that the last sentence is contradictory to this post, but thats not the intention here. The intention was to defend scf030, because I don’t think he was treated very fairly.
Finally, to the actual topic. I would rate PP’s games in this order:
Tokimeki Check-in
X-change
Snow Drop
I have not played Water Closet even though I do own it to support PP. The reason I rated it in that order is because I disliked the artstyle of Snow Drop. Which worries me about Little My Maid.
Thank you for reading all that! Any questions or private disagreements you would like to express, feel free to email me at mjohnson@shf.org
Bigdog
Rather than making heated arguments, everybody calm down and discuss this rationally. The purchase of Peach Princess games is not compulsory, and it is most certainly not going to help matters in saying ‘no one will like Water Closet because it is disgusting and only perverts would play it’. I think the statement is construed as faulting Peach Princess for translating games that does not promote Bishoujo games but in fact to the detriment of it, when Peach Princess has repeatedly said that the Japanese company is gauging consumer interest. It’s blaming the proverbial messenger for the bad tidings which he brings. I would also like Peach Princess to end nervous speculation about why X-change far outsells the other games. If there’s something I learned from my training in Biological Sciences, Sociology and Anthropology, it is not to judge data Prima Facie without investigating its underlying causes. Looking at the sales data and drawing premature conclusions is confusing the results with the cause. i started the Bishoujo Gaming Survey project with the expressed purpose of ending all these anxieties, and I am extremely grateful to all the people who have volunteered their time and energy to participate in the project. Please wait patiently, I am on the fan’s side, the Japanese Bishoujo Game Companies’s side, and the hardworking stiffs at Peach Princess, Himeya and Hobibox Europe to help the genre. Please, no more hostilities.
Oh, and I thought Water Closet was very funny, but I didn’t like the Scatology aspect of the game too much. This much I know: I am not a pervert.
Well, I may have sounded a bit harsh against scf030, but then, again, you know that it didn’t sound like he had played the game, If you’re going to critice something, whenever it’s a book, a game or a movie, you have to watch/read/play it yourself first, otherwise, no one will take your arguments seriously. and you also need to point out exactly what parts of the game you find that “disgusting”, and you can’t do that without playing the game.
[This message has been edited by Spectator Beholder (edited 01-24-2002).]
Usually, when an individual is not willing to listen to others, that individual is not worth paying attention to. Kumiko is such an individual . Like I say before, luckily Peach Princess is not run by Kumiko, otherwise the company would be bankrupted by now .
Kumiko, although you might try hard to believe otherwise, your opinion, like mine, doesn’t matter. What you say, or what you do, doesn’t affect how Peach Princess do business. You are just a little saleman trying to sell any product no matter how bad or good it is.
Anyway, this will be the last message I will post at this board since I think this is just a silly board where you guys use mostly for advertisement. And whenever someone says something negative about your products, they are blasted.
Kumiko, I hope you are not actually believe in what you had been saying about stuffs like “you customers have to put up with the sucky games we release since the good games won’t come here to America” or “Reviewers should only post advertisement about the games and not their opinions of how good the games are” .
First of all, if the good games come to the US, they will not be released by you guys but by some big companies, and that will in fact put you guys out of business. So don’t give me the crap about buying for the future, and try to hide the facts that you guys are just trying to sell your games right now. And since most of your games are so crappy, you have to make up this silly reason.
Adios, good luck. I am going to play Adam Double Factor now, it is way better than all of your games. For all who had not play Himeya’s games yet, try some of them, you will be surprise how good the artwork and stories are compare to the crappy games that they sell here at Peach Princess.
You know, looking back at how innocently this topic start and where it’s running around now…
Since everyone else is adding their thoughts, might as well add mine as well. Let’s see if I can get them in order though…
Bigdog-san, I really felt your post was well thought out. Unfortunately, all of us are human and we get heated up and defensive, even on a BBS. I know on one of the other threads, it sounded like people were getting all on American’s cases and it got me all heated up. It was rather hard to calm myself and not fire back some “reflexive” statements.
Bokmeow-san, depends on your definition of ‘pervert’. From my psych. courses, I know fetishes like this are more prevelant than I thought they were. So being a ‘pervert’ because of them depends on one’s point of view. (Though scatology isn’t my thing either, but I’m not about to impose my views on someone else’s fun.)
As for scf030-san, well, he said he isn’t sticking around. Like bigdog-san said, he did have some valid points but instead of defending his personal opinion, he turned it into a personal attack. Which is usually the wrong way of trying to establish yourself anywhere. (like a BBS for example.) And I’m wondering why he thought that a BBS, sponsored and admined by PeaPri, would be filled with people who aren’t PeaPri fans? I’m guessing most of us got here through the PeaPri website, probably after buying a game, and we probably are all a bit favoritably biased in that regard towards PeaPri. And I won’t go into his assertions of Kumiko-san’s position in the company. Unless he himself worked for PeaPri or something, how the heck would he know what she does? After all, one of my friend’s is the VP of his company and he does all the admin of their BBS. Some higher up people do still get their “hands dirty” after all.
Anyways, back to the topic. (I think it’s the topic, I’ve kinda gotten lost.) I’m not going to worry overly much at this point about the top three sellers. It’s interesting and informative but I’d like to see a few more titles come out before I start worrying any. If X-Change is still tops by the end of the year, then I’ll start to have more concerns. But until then, I’ll just have to bug my friends to buy more copies of TCI and Snow Drop for themselves right?
Fuumu, I wanted to email scf030 because he is a Bishoujo gaming fan, and his feedback, no matter how critical, is an indicator of what the current niche market is looking for, that elusive, difficult to quantify criteria of games. I can’t even email him since he didn’t provide one. If there’s anyone on this forum who knows his email, please let me know, ok?
I don’t want to sound critical of scf030 because he is offering his opinion freely of why he thinks X-change outsells the other. He makes a good observation in stating that X-change may have the Ranma 1/2 thing going for it. It is not even relevant that Ranma 1/2 is no longer popular; what is important to the average consumer or the people uninterested in datings sims is that this is a tie-in. Much as I despise some of the tactics ADV pushes, they do bring over some good titles, and they usually push it in the following fashion:
Sakura Wars: Based on the Hit Video Game!
Ninja Resurrection: Back of box describes Jubei, casually drops in Ninja Scroll in parenthesis, conveniently dropping his last name Yagyu, so no one makes the connection that he is unrelated to Jubei Kibagami from Ninja Scroll, and the two titles are totally unrelated.
One of the biggest evil is drawing theories about an outcome through deduction, make apparent logical associations, and consequently conclude “Ah, that must be why this happened because it was caused by that.” Negative. If scf030 advances the hypothesis that X-change is popular because of Ranma 1/2, but his opponent counters with the argument ‘No, because Ranma 1/2 is no longer popular’, the counter is moot because Ranma 1/2 was popular, and people still know about Ranma 1/2. Snow Drop may lack sales because of a lack of tie-in, if this hypothesis is true. But, if the lack of tie-in is the result of depressed sales for Snow Drop, then why is Tokimeki Check-In!, a newer title than Snow Drop, ahead in sales? I just want everyone to be self introspective for a while, and not resort to petty name calling. scf030 cannot help by saying ‘Water Closet sucks because only perverts like it’. These are internalized opinions which reflects how he feels about the game at first glance, but he needs to express them, you know? Peach Princess and other companies need to know:
1. Why were you attracted to the game?
2. Why did you like the game?
3. Why did you dislike the game?
Petty rivalry like ‘Himeya is better than Peach Princess’ is reminiscent of ‘Sega is better than Nintendo’ or ‘Dragon Ball Z is better than Rurouni Kenshin’. I’m not afraid of expressing equal enthusiasm for either Nintento or Sega, for Himeya or Peach Princess, ok I’m not a big fan of Dragon Ball Z or Rurouni Kenshin but I can like many other Anime at the same time. I’ve played both Himeya and Peach Princess games and they both have good games. scf030, if you want to talk calmly and rationally, feel free to email me at yeoushiu@eden.rutgers.edu.
Interesting topic… thinking about it, when I first discovered the Peach Princess site, having no knowledge of any of the games that they have on offer here, I had a look at the various descriptions of the games in the products page. I’m fairly certain that X-Change would have more likely have been the first game I ordered had I have not done more research into what the games are about (Reviews, asking on this forum etc.) since obviously the page about the game is not going to go into any of the negative points, such as “X-Change is a short game and doesn’t have voices, oh, and it doesn’t have CD music either” or whatever else people might dislike about a game (personally, I have no problem with MIDI music or how old the game engine is), but because there are many people who won’t do the research first and want to order something ASAP, X-Change does sound like a great concept and interesting game when you read about it on the description page and there’s no real clue that it’s any shorter than the other games on the site, or that the engine is older, I don’t know how accurate any of the description for X-Change on the products page really is because I don’t even own the game myself yet, but I do know cases of at least two people who have bought the game and expected voice acting. One guy who bought the game was advicing me not to buy it because it he said that “it has no story at all, it’s not funny and it’s just perverted” (This is almost opposite to the impression I have of the game from reading about it on the products page). Fortunetly, this wasn’t the first game he bought from Peach Princess and he does like the other games like Snow Drop and Tokimeki Check-In very much and will continue to buy games here as they are released, but imagine if this was the first game that he ordered from Peach Princess. Do you think that he would be willing to risk buying any more games from this site considering what his impression of Peach Princess games would be after playing X-Change? Maybe he would research into other titles; read reviews, forums like this one etc. but then again, maybe not. There are many fans of bishoujo gaming who visit this forum who all have and express their own opinions of Peach Princess’ games, but there are a great many more who don’t visit the forums and don’t read the reviews, simply going on what the description of the item on the products page is telling them. If they are mis-lead to believe that they will like a game and after playing it, they find that they dis-like it, do you think that they will still believe descriptions of the other products offered here? I doubt that very much. I think that it’s very important that the first bishoujo game a person plays is one that they will like, otherwise they might get a bad impression of the whole genre. Personally, the first visual novel bishoujo game that I played was True Love and I enjoyed the game very much (My second favourite bishoujo game so far, as it happens), this lead me to buy other bishoujo games, but had I have played Fatal Relation as my first bishoujo game, I may never have put any effort into looking for more bishoujo games since I didn’t really enjoy the artwork, story or characters at all of this game, not that Fatal Relation a bad game, just not my preference.
As for scf030, he obviously has no conception of opinion, since he states that Peach Princess games are all crap. I doubt that he has even played all of the current games that Peach Princess offer, as I am yet to find anyone who didn’t enjoy Tokimeki Check-in or Snow Drop, but the fact is, it’s an opinion and obviously he thinks that most of us haven’t played Himeya’s games already, which I’m guessing most of us probably have (I’ve played Desire and the demo of EVE: Burst Error, which seems to be an excellent game and the next game that I will probably order), but even though they are the same genres, the games are very different from each other and can’t really be compared, a game like EVE: Burst Error or Desire has a completely different artstyle, story, music and even interactivity to a game like Snow Drop or Tokimeki Check-In. Every one of these games is unique and it’s all just a matter of what you want in a game and your personal preferences, similarly, scf030 states that X-Change sounds cooler, but personally I upon seeing the titles for the game when I first came to this site found that the name Snow Drop interested me more than what the name X-Change did. Again, it just depends on the person.
And will people also remember that it is not just the US that Peach Princess are releasing these games to, but the whole world outside of Japan. These games aren’t only bought by people in the US. I have friends from various countries who I talk to via ICQ including Germany, Greece, Singapore and of course, the UK (where I live) who buy and enjoy bishoujo products.
[This message has been edited by TurricaN (edited 01-24-2002).]
sigh my enthusiasm to post on this board for today suddenly dissapeared.
Hey kumiko, here’s my take on things. No flame, or insult intended.
When I’m looking at a new product, the first thing I think of if familiarity. Think of it this way. If a guy was just new to anime, say, a friend told him he should check it out, where would he start? He wouldn’t just start off with some random show off the shelf. He’d look for something that would be familiar to him. Surely he would grab something with a familiar theme to him, something that he can relate to.
The same thing applies to video games. When I look at a box for a game, I immediately try finding something familiar to me. Say, it’s a stratagy game? It plays like something I’ve seen before, but improved on? These are things that catch my eye as a consumer. Lets apply this to bishoujo games.
Say I walk into a comic book store, never having even heard of bishoujo games before, and on the shelf, Tokimeki Check-In, Snow Drop, and X-Change catch my eye (I’ll leave WC out since I’m not familiar with it). The first thing I do is try to find something familar with it. I have to say against kumiko’s speculation of X-Change’s “People want it for the sex with no effort”, since atleast from what I’ve gathered from your site here, all 3 games (I guess snow drop not as much) advertise very similar amounts of sexual contact. Perhaps in game theres a difference, but the consumer would never know the difference until after they had it at home and were playing it. So anyways, as I said, I would look for familiarity. They’re all adventure games, so nothing pops out here. They both seem to advertise similar levels of sex, so no avail there.
If I’m a regular anime buff, like so many of your customers probably are though, I would probably find the similarities through the art style. This is where I think scf030 may actually have a point. Perhaps Ranma¬Ω is old. Perhaps its no longer popular (although I know many who would argue). But it has many, many people who know about it. And it’s not just Ranma. Its art looks like they could have been cells for an anime production. This is where many people first draw thier familiarity. People want to be familiar with a product before purchasing it. This is why people could be put off from the different art style in Snow Drop.
You see, change, as many of you probably know, isn’t the most accepted thing out there. Many people are put off by change, and differences from what they are used to. X-Change’s characters appear to be more familiar to most anime viewers than the characters from Snow Drop. Just like our guy above that was being introduced to anime, he would be a bit sceptical about his friend suggesting him to watch these ‘cartoons’. Similarly, I think, atleast to me, the different style’s would make many anime goers sceptical.
So, in my humble, personal, but not absolute opinion, the differences between your sales of those three products lies within the style. X-Change isn’t as pretty as the other two, but it looks more like your standard cell anime show. Tokimeki has a much finer, better looking art, but its quite different from standard anime. And snow drop would be considered right out compared to the other two.
People compare on whats presented to them, and they look for something familiar to present itself to them, and for me, this presents itself in the form of the games art.
Hope someone finds this post entertaining. Talk to you all later.
Doddler
I completely understand the concept of buying what is available to make available what you want…I’m sure Kumiko and the rest PeaPri shudders at some of the stuff they are being offered, because of the reluctance of the Japanese to license out their bishoujo works…but they need to take what they can get to raise awareness of the genre in general…i think it’s a good thing that you are letting people know “This is all we can get right now until we can show Japan we really want this stuff”…it knid of gives us a goal
I have supported PeaPri as much as i can with my limited budget, even though i didn’t really like all the games…contrary to the sales charts, X-Change was my least favorite title…it gave me a few chuckles, but i really enjoy games with more depth and story and more point to the sexual scenes…but I do not regret buying the game, as it shows support for the genre in general…I hold out hope that by supporting the games I only think are mediocre, I will eventually be rewarded with Slave Bazaar!