To temper something that Nandemonai said, if we couple the fact that bishoujo games in the states sell for less dollars, and, overall, at a slower rate with an even conservative estimate of 15% piracy, you can see how bishoujo translation companies are struggling to open up the English market.
For example, lets say a good, well-reviewed and received adult bishoujo game in Japan sells 25,000 units in a month (using numbers from what Himeya Soft used to tell me) at 750 yen per unit (~75 dollars per game). That comes to a total of ~1.9 million dollars. Now, this is gross.
Okay, lets say that same game is translated to English for the world market. Now, using the same numbers Himeya Soft gave me, lets say the game sells 1500 units in a month, at $45 per game. That is $67,500 gross.
So, not only are there fewer games sold, any game that is lost due to piracy really cuts into the profits that translation companies can make. If you keep with the English example, and say that 225 sales are lost due to piracy (from our conservative est. of 15%), that is a loss of some $10,000 gross potential income.
Now, if you are a Japanese bishoujo gaming company, and you are only seeing a trickle of money coming back… it is reasonable to see why they are reluctant to make a big push.
They want to see that there is a potential… and, right now, they really aren’t seeing one. Sure, we might clamor that there is a market just waiting to be tapped… but their efforts right now have shown that tapping into the market might be highly difficult.
Or, to use a different example, for as popular as Anime is suppossed to be, you only see some dozen titles offered at Blockbuster, and only about 20 offered at NetFlix. There are litterally hundreds of anime that have been translated… and two of the largest rental places in the US carry about less than 1% of the total range.
Now, yes, the numbers from Himeya Soft are from a couple of years ago… but I wouldn’t see the figures changing that much.
Anyway, just my thoughts.
[This message has been edited by Mike Thomas (edited 08-01-2003).]