I'm not going to point any fingers, but I've witnessed multiple reports suggesting that contractors working on projects for JAST are encountering a number of hurdles and frustrations, working with JAST specifically, that are severely impacting overall morale. One recurring theme is unexplained or poorly justified delays. Another is poor marketing and handling of promotional materials, especially for titles with significant gameplay elements which require special marketing (I actually wrote a blog post with my complaints specifically pertaining to Yumina the Ethereal).
Does JAST have any plans to address these concerns going forward? It seems like a real problem when very talented people who normally work for free start complaining that they're not being given enough resources / authority to complete a project to their satisfaction in a timely manner. I'm hearing this from multiple sources too.
I can’t comment on your other points, but JAST USA marketing is definitely lacking. It’s seriously not easy to market visual novels. As someone that’s been pushing to increase awareness of visual novels via social media for half a year now, I can tell you, it takes creativity. Affiliates don’t have early access to assets like music, script pieces, voice acting, etc, which are key selling points of these games.
Another issue: just about nobody in the western world knows famous Japanese voice actors/actresses. Not even their names are known to people! Popular voice actors, to my knowledge, are a huge selling point for these games, hence why they rake the big bucks.
Think about the just released Hanachirasu, for example. It’s a story obviously intended for a Japanese audience. It’s rocking subject matters like corruption in Japan, revival of tradition (ie. swordcraft), rebirth of Japanese nationalism, etc. You got nationalistic ninjas battling wealthy west-leaning corporations. Without any resonant cultural context, what westerner is going to pick this game up, despite its awesome characters and storytelling? The answer is open-ended, as I’m sure the audience can be found with a proper marketing plan. It’s pretty much a mountainous task, but it can be done.
Wow, this thread is dead as fuck. xP
Well, it's not entirely surprising that JAST wouldn't respond. It's also not surprising that the 5 people who frequent this board might not have anything to say on it. From what I've gathered, people who've worked for both JAST and Mangagamer have a poor opinion of JAST's management style. They might want to consider talking to their contractors and soliciting honest feedback if they want the reliable and motivated people to stick around for future projects.
Hi, we're here. Sorry we're not meeting everyone's standards. We are doing our best, and over the past half year I believe we've actually given JAST USA's brand and our products an amazing amount of attention, relaunching the website, adding instant downloads, and beginning to clear our backlog of games (which everyone hates, we know...), and hopefully beginning to end our reputation as a company that takes too long to ship games. We're still in the middle our changeover, and more changes are coming (some J-List related, including a new website there which launches soon).
With regard to marketing, I believe we're doing the best we can considering our resources. You do know that adult games are something that no one wants to allow advertising for, right? Sites like YouTube, CruncyRoll, Twitter and Google Adwords ban 18+ advertising and/or otherwise ensure we don't get anywhere with our advertising message. Facebook is an okay place to advertise, but only for general anime/otaku stuff. Trying to target eroge fans on Facebook is not effective since many are not on the site, and almost no one will share an eroge related post, which is the only worthwhile goal on the site as far as marketing goes.
We've had full page ads in Otaku USA, which no one here will have seen because only lower-level fans would read a print anime magazines, not the higher level otakus who consume media digitally. We are on Nyaa and 4chan, two places where otakus frequent, and no company can market through Reddit because it's part of the tradition of Reddit to be hostile to any company for any reason. We push hard to get indy game blogs to review our titles, but they nearly always have policies forbidding any treatment of 18+ content. The main site to do reviews of our games is Kotaku, much maligned by many fans, who at least does a pretty good job of getting a tiny bit of attention for our products.
If you have other suggestions we'd love to hear them. I wish Newtype USA were still around, as that was _the_ place to get your message out to fans about anything otaku related.
The fast-paced release schedule this year has been pretty impressive so far. Keep up the good work.
I do understand the vast difficulties confronting you as an adult publisher. Have you considered engaging with "Let's Play" video makers on YouTube? I think they'd be happy to promote your games for you. Since most of your games don't have gameplay, you might want to come to an agreement with them as to what kind of content they're allowed to show (i.e., maybe you don't want them to show an entire playthrough from start to finish).
You really need demos/trials for your games, especially ones you put on Steam. It's pretty tough to expect your average curious Steam user to plop down $20+ on a genre they've never tried before. Game trials will greatly increase your exposure.
@ Peter Payne
I don’t think it could hurt to look at advertizing with Ero Manga companies such as Project-H and Faku. You could cross promote each others companies and top titles. You could get them to place a color leaflet in their books or have an ad at the end of the book itself (that way it would also be in their digital books) or both. If you’re promoting say Starless you could include a link on the flyer for a free demo of the game.
This way you’re actually targeting paying customers that are already buying closely related goods. You could also check if Rightstuf would be able to include ads for you in their shipments that include H-goods from companies other than your own.
"This way you're actually targeting paying customers that are already buying closely related goods."
I think this point is really worth emphasizing. Advertising on torrent sites is probably going to have limited effectiveness. These aren't the type of people that are likely to buy your games. But Fakku subscribers? They just might.
I agree talking to LP'ers on youtube would be a good idea. It did really well for Huniepop.
I think the all-ages version of Littlewitch Girlish Grimoire would be a good fit. Plenty funny and cute, with a little strategy in the training.
You should try contacting someone like PressHeartToContinue, who does a lot of anime content.
I don't know if anybody's listening, but I'm going to make two suggestions for JAST:
1) If you can't speed up the localization process, don't make the acquisition of an upcoming title public until you're finished with it.
2) Have a staff blog and keep it constantly updated.
The reasoning behind my suggestions is simple: There are definitely issues going on with marketing to expand the audience, but your company has just as many issues trying to internally market itself to its own audience.
Consider this: How long does it usually take for you guys to release a title after you announce that you've gotten the rights to localize it? Three to four years? Possibly five?
With my first suggestion, it addresses a very significant issue: You can't expect your own fans to stay hyped for an upcoming game if they have to wait years before the actual release date. I pretty much forgot that you guys acquired Starless back in 2011-2012 until you announced it a few months ago. Would it be difficult to believe that many others may have forgotten about it in the same way?
Negotiate the license to a game and work on it for however long it takes, then announce/market the title once you've completed the localization (or at least 95~99% finished). Do not annouce anything about an upcoming title until you're ready to come up with a definitive release date.
Obviously, you need to find a way to release a game faster. However, by witholding any announcements for future titles until you're finished localizing it, you can devote your time/money to market it after the localization process. Fans will also retain their interest better because they won't have to wait as long once they realize that you've acquired it.
With the second suggestion of starting a blog and keeping it constantly updated, I'm taking a page out of Mangagamer's playbook. As niche of a company as they may be, the most intelligent marketing decision they made was to create a staff blog, and keep it fresh with updates.
Sure, both you and MG have Twitter and Facebook accounts, but you can't put as much content in either of them as you could with a regular blog post.
Even if you don't have anything to announce as far as updates or release dates, you need to keep it fresh with relevant content. You can add things like staff/translator/artist commentary for specific titles or related news events (like upcoming cons).
The whole point is to keep fans interested while they're waiting for new titles to come out--It's only been ten days since May 1st, and MG has over six blog posts (normally they have over ten a month). By constantly updating a blog with content related to either your games or the VN market, you show fans that you're still at work. It prevents your own fans from thinking you guys are dead.
You guys have a devblog on Tumblr, and that's a good start. However, you need to put more content in your posts. MG often writes multiple paragraphs worth of detailed content each of their posts, whereas a lot of the posts you guys have are 1-2 liners accompanied by a few pictures. At its current state, your Tumblr account might as well be just a glorified Twitter account.
I'm not even sure if Tumblr is the best blogging platform out there. I never liked the interface myself, and it's rather difficult to navigate posts.
If you're using your devblog to market yourselves to potential fans, it would also help to make the link to it more prominent and easier to find in your front page. MG has a button near the top left of their front page that says "STAFF BLOG". On the other hand, your users have to scroll all the way to the bottom of your front page find the link to your devblog (written in small, hard to read letters, I may add). Don't assume all of us are capable of finding anything.
Actually, now that I think about it, it would also help if you did the same for links to this forum. It's kinda hard to find your messageboard and talk to you guys if the link to it isn't easily accessible from your front page.