Poll: Fan Translations - Boon or Bane to the English Market?

Visual Novel Community Archive, 2000-2009
#21

Depends on who you are.

Fan translations very well might be hurting JastUSA’s ability to make money on any individual because they raise the standards, they can’t just keep releasing ZyX sex romps and expect to keep making money. This is likely why they got a deal with Nitro+ (well that, and MangaGamer has got a bunch of kick ass titles compared to Jast release, Shuffle and Higurashi have far more appeal then Family Project and random sex romps). However at the same time, fan translations do a good job at expanding the visual novel community.

For fans of visual novels though, it is absolutely wonderful. Many of the top tier games that we English speakers would have not gotten otherwise we have gotten thanks to fan translators. Say what you will, but I doubt most non Japanese speakers will complain about getting stuff from Type Moon or Key through fan translators then just getting ZyX stuff from Jast. MangaGamer very well might have came into existence due to fan translations creating a market outside of sex romps, and now they are releasing big title after big title.

For the consumer, competition, regardless of the source (fan translations or other companies like MangaGamer), means that the consumer benefits. If Jast suffers because of this competition, even if it is not truly legal, that means that they have to adapt, which can be seen with a deal like their Nitro+ deal. Complaining about “illegal competition” does absolutely nothing because that competition is not going to go away, and honestly, if Jast can’t benefit from the significantly expanding Visual Novel fanbase, then they are doing something wrong.

#22

:roll:

#23

For the purposes of this poll, put yourself in the shoes of an official localization company, real or imagined. But your point is taken.

#24

Fixed.

#25

I’m pretty sure there’s a lot of people out there who would play SHUFFLE! since they’ve watched the animated version and have never heard of Family Project.

#26

The problem may start after they’ve played it though! I mean, seriously, SHUFFLE!? I’m a Nishimata Aoi fan and eagerly buy all of her doujinshis and stuff, but really, putting SHUFFLE! over Kazokei story-wise? Character-wise? Plot-wise? PACE-wise? No, seriously… :roll:

#27

Boon, they are obvious indicators of demand in the market.

#28

I can only speak for myself, but I finished up Shuffle! within a couple weeks of getting it. I’m still stuck in the prologue of Family Project months later. Shuffle! caught and held my interest whereas Family Project has failed to do so thus far. Admittedly, slice of life isn’t something that terribly interests me.

Really, the only problem I see with the original statement was that Family Project was adjacent to “random sex romps”. I think it’s rather obvious that, to your average casual US visual novel shopper, Shuffle! and Higurashi are much higher profile titles than Family Project. I’m sure that wouldn’t hold true in Japan, but there you go.

#29

The amount of twincest flowing from the Promised Land has not changed, therefore I vote no impact.

#30

Kazoku Keikaku was a great game, but I’ll admit that there were times I felt that it was needlessly dragging out, more so on the later playthroughs due to the massive amount of non-branched story. Shuffle would probably beat out Kazokei popularity/sales wise if only because it is much easier to digest, especially for more casual fans of the genre. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Shuffle is “better”, seeing how very different they are in style, but it is certainly a much smaller time commitment to finish it. Overall, I enjoyed both quite a bit, but with Shuffle feeling like it completely failed to take advantage of the setting of the 3 worlds etc, and Kazoku Keikaku feeling like it was badly paced at times and had rather lackluster CG quality and quantity to match the quality of the story itself.

#31

I apologize with how I worded Family Project. In that line, I was not implying Family Project was a sex romp, but rather listed it separately from the category “sex romp” since it is the only Jast release this year that isn’t a sex romp (last was Princess Waltz last year). I also was not trying to imply Shuffle was better than Family Project or Family Project was better than Shuffle. In that statement, my only purpose was to say that Jast may find it harder to make money per customer because of fan competition, and MangaGamer competition because something like Shuffle and Higurashi have vastly more appeal than Family Project and the typical games Jast releases.

Also, since Dark_Shiki said that this poll is putting ones self into a VN company’s shoes instead of the consumers shoes (since the consumer obviously benefits from both fan translations and increased competition), I will repeat this point from my first post.
If Jast suffers because of this fan competition, even if it is not truly legal (and increased legal competition companies like MangaGamer), that means that they have to adapt, which can be seen with stuff like their Nitro+ deal. Complaining about “illegal competition” does absolutely nothing because that competition is not going to go away, and honestly, if Jast can’t benefit from the significantly expanding Visual Novel fanbase, then they are doing something wrong.

#32

I don’t see any impact on the English released market. If you look at the number of titles, as well as which ones are being released commercially, it seems to help more than it hinders. With every title you have out in English, that’s just one more game that can snag someone into trying more of these games, including the commercial ones.

I’d comment further but most of it would just end up derailing the topic. :stuck_out_tongue:

#33

Bane.
Call me cynical, but I believe that fan translations of unlicensed games simply promote the “direct download” of those same games, and I STRONGLY doubt that the “direct downloaders” will repent and buy the licensed games after having tasted the forbidden fruit :roll: …

#34

Now that I’ve finished the game and read some other people’s comments, I think I understand why it’s considered not very good. Unbalanced pacing, lack of development of some characters, complete lack of follow-through on the yuri - especially in the epilogues. (And for me personally, setting someone up to look like the true-end girl, then pretty much ditching her completely. Even with the way things went, the true end SHOULD have been twincest, and instead only teased that and then focused on the most boring character! Argh!)

It’s still great if you’re an absolutely desperate english yuri fan who loves dramatic evil rituals and blood-drinking, because there’s not a whole lot else to choose from!

#35

Hey, that’s not entirely fair. I was a dirty pirate waaaaay back in the day before I started buying ero-games. Then again I got all my erogames from some Dutch site (I think it was Dutch… I couldn’t understand a word the page said) and never really gave any thought to were these games in English were coming from.

Woohoo, good old 28.8kbit modem days, getting 10-12MB per hour at the very best…

#36

Even if JAST did drop the ball on KazoKei as much as I’ve heard, they could have translated the entire work into Pig Latin, replaced all the voices with chipmunk noises and had all the art redrawn by a four year old using crayons and it would STILL be better than Shuffle!

Heck, they could have just left the disc out entirely and just sent out the boxes and what you’d get would still be more entertaining than Shuffle! The only way they could possibly make it worse is if they accidentally sent you Shuffle! instead. Or Dieselmine’s Shiofuki Jigoku, that’s grudgingly worse than Shuffle! (although the big difference between Shiofuki Jigoku and Shuffle! is that Shiofuki is a) cheaper, and b) a game you haven’t heard of before. b alone probably makes it better than Shuffle! if we’re not talking about objective quality here =p)

#37

Most of us who were around in the old days did. I’ve admitted here before that I did. I didn’t give a lot of thought to where the games came from either, but I figured that they had to be really old and therefore the company probably out of business. This turned out not to be true, and I became a paying customer of PP when they opened because I, uh, recognized the CG of one of the games they intitially announced some 8 years ago.

After I started hanging out here, I found out that - despite the incredible demand for ‘hentai’ material - nobody except maybe a few thousand people actually buy the translated versions. The true impact of piracy might be debatable overall, but in this case, it’s not a grey area at all. When sales are that low, piracy can and will kill the entire market, even basically guarantee there won’t be another attempt.

#38

As I see it, there’s basically 2 kinds of piracy. One is by people without means to buy the product anyway, in which case it doesn’t really matter because it’s not a lost sale. In this case I mean people who are unable to buy anything they pirate, not those who are unable to buy everything they pirate (which could be anyone since for instance, filling up an entire iPod with music would take in the realm of $60.000). Not that it makes it right, but as far as practical consequences go it’s not as big a deal.

Then there’s the piracy committed by people who have the means to buy what they pirate, but feel their money would be better spent elsewhere. “I refuse to pay $50 for this because “it sucks” but it’s good enough that I’ll take it for free, yoink / I refuse to pay $50 for this because I’m so “smart” I can get it for free yoink / I refuse to pay $50 for this because I want to spend it on something else”, which is where the real harm is done. Neither is any better than the other legally, of course, but I think there is a practical difference between which group does the actual harm. Lord knows what the ratio of group 1 to group 2 is though.

The sad part is that the piracy of erogames is made possible by a paying customer putting up the content to begin with (I doubt they have people in the distribution lines sending them copies early as the case has been for regular games that get cracked), causing damage far far beyond the money they spent on the game. I’m not saying that it’s more right to do it with regular games from big studios, but I find it awful that a fan of the genre would cause so much damage to a market as vulnerable as the localized erogame market.

#39

The former category doesn’t really exist though: no one, and I mean no one, with regular access to a computer to play computer games, and most probably Internet access, is “unable to buy anything (he) pirate(s).” Such people, without a doubt, have more than enough to buy a couple of the games they pirate, but choose to rather spend that money in other goods (non-vital goods, I must point out since it could justified to spend money on vital goods --basic food, etc.-- rather than entertainment), probably junk food, general entertainment (nightclubs, movie theatres, etc.), ultra-recent gadgets (such as hundred dollars cell phones, up-to-date computers, DVD player, Blu-ray player, etc.), new and expensive clothing, etc.

#40

The curious thing for me, with that, is that from experience with our little indie games, if you sell separate demo/full version, it can take months for it to turn up on the pirate sites, if that. Because very few people are willing to pay their own money for the full game and then turn around and give it to others for free. (Games that are sold with some sort of DRM locking the full game, though, get cracked quickly, because all you have to do is crack the demo and you’re there.)

I monitor some big pirate sites, and I’ve never yet found anyone distributing a copy of the special deluxe version of one of my games which was never sold with DRM. Lots of requests, lots of people trading the other version, but years after the fact even though you could buy a copy for a penny, nobody trading the deluxe.

When this protection finally breaks and someone does share the full, it’s generally either because they bought the game and didn’t like it, so wanted revenge, or they’ve just discovered piracy and want to share the games they own as thanks for their new community giving them stuff.

Who is seeding the net with full versions of english erogames? Who’s actually willing to pay for them and then give them away? It’s not a common trait. I could see people who’d gotten free review copies doing it, because they’re out nothing. I can see people who run paid hentai services doing it because they’re all about the stolen content, but I think PP cracks down on those pretty hard…

Kids. People in certain countries.