Seing things like this is really making me depressed

Visual Novel Community Archive, 2000-2009
#21
quote:
Originally posted by TurricaN:
This guy is pretty stupid. How can $35 - $50 be too much for these games?! I can remember when the SNES was released and games cost up to £60 ($90) on release, some being even more than that, and people happily bought them! I'm pretty sure that the average PC games costs around the same or more than what bishoujo games do, at least over here in the UK they do. We pay around £35 - £40 ($50 - $60) for newly released PC games, Peach Princesses games are cheap in comparison with that. I don't even know how that they dare use the price of bishoujo games as an excuse.

... because that they don't want the games, that's the simple truth. If they did, they'd support the market instead if killing it, but they're not doing it... "people believe what they want to believe", that's why the pirates uses reasons like this; they don't want to believe that they're killing the market, so they're hidding the truth from themselves. They also want to believe that bishoujo games are "crap" just becuse that they haven't encountered games like that before and are unfamiliar with them. If they throught a bit more of it, they'd see that bishoujno games has the same valute as any other games - probably more than that, actuallt, and that there's reasons for the prices being like this now...

I'd bet thet this guy don't know much about econonmics either (aside from his own).

#22

One thing that I was wondering was: What does Peach Princess think of fan translated games? For example, look at many of the SNES RPG games that were translated into English in the last two years (Ranma 1/2: Treasure of the Crimson Cats, Sailor Moon: Another Story, Tales of Phantasia, Seiken Densetsu 3, etc.). Those translations were made completely by fan effort over the course of 1-2 years, using only volunteer work and without cooperation from the original game makers. The source code for the game was not even available, so tinkering with the assembly level code was necessary.

The RPG games are much more complicated than Bishoujo Games in terms of program complexity, and I think they have more text to be translated as well.

#23

Well, I’ve never encountered fantranslated games, but… Well, let’s say this: If a group of people who are able to tranbslate Japanese decides to translate the game and lay out their translation at the net in, for example Microsoft World-files, then I’d have no objections, since they’re just providing people with the translations, not the actual game (in other words, people would still have to buy the game in order to have any use for the translations)

But if they translated and put the translation in the game without permission from the makers and lay out the “fantransalted” game at the net, then I’d most certainly ovject, sinve they’d be pirating the game in that case.

I can’t speak for Peach Princess itself, but I think they thinks much the same: If it’s just the translation, then there’s no harm in doing it, but if they include the game in the whole thing in some way, then they’re doing something illegal.

#24

Personally,I don’t think those pirates are fans of the games to begin with.

They are just there to distribute those games for free on a massive scale so that they can feel good doing acts of “charity”.

They can keep their communistical ideas if they want,but it had been prvoven by history Communism does not work out well in the end.

#25

What the pirates are doing is wrong, but please don’t just throw around communism like a catch phrase. Marx’s ideology was a very idealistic one, because at the turn of the industrial revolution he sympathized with the plight of the women, the children and the blue collar worker and recognized the horror of the Bourgeoisie ruthlessly exploiting the proletariats by not paying the deserved wage for their work, and pocketing the profits that their workers never see. Luckily the academians, as well as the businesses, saw the writing on the wall and the businessmen, not so much saw the error of their ways as the workers gained momentum in the political arena as to steer laws and policies from disproportionately benefiting businesses. Don’t use communism as a catch-all expression of ‘something that is naive but doomed to failure in reality.’ Many other countries have very powerful communist parties, America is one of those bizarre exceptions without a particularly powerful movement, and not to mention a powerful stigmatism attached to the communism ideology because of its past history in witch-hunting ‘communists,’ and its overreaction to the then cold war enemies Russia and China.

#26
quote:
Originally posted by Kumiko Kamiyama:
... guns do not kill people, only people kill people...

True... What do you say about this, by the way?:

"It's strange to see companies pushing for people to buy their products used in order to save money. After all, if you buy a secondhand copy of the game on ebay, you're not putting any money into the company's pocket. For most practical purposes, there's no difference from the company's standpoint in between your buying a used copy and your downloading the game free. (Potential exception being that if there were no downloading, only reselling, then there would be a limited number of copies available.)

So when I see the argument of "Buy the game for $40 and resell it for $20 and then you've only paid $20 for it".... well, the math is a bit strange. If only three people are interested in the game, and person one buys it for $40, resells it for $20, person two buys it for $20 and resells it for $20, person three buys it for $20 and keeps it... then
the company has made $40
person 1 has lost $20
person 2 has lost nothing
person 3 has lost $20
three people have played the game

It just seems like you'd expect the company to sell the game for $20 on CD-R media and ban it from being resold on ebay. (Requiring that you have someone netcopping on ebay, of course.) Then if three people buy the game, each pays $20, and the company makes $60.

I'm not trying to say that $20 is the magic number (even though I think it is ) just that I find the whole "buy it used cheaper!" argument to be awfully weird. Many companies have tried to prevent software from being resold at all precisely because they don't get anything out of such resale."

This was another post which just got posted at that site, as an "answer" to that I told them that if they didn't want to buy the games directly from the companies because of what they call "high prices", they could always buy the games used, which would be cheaper for them.

[This message has been edited by Spectator Beholder (edited 12-23-2001).]

#27

About fan translated games; the majority of fan translated games are not released by the translators as fully translated games at all, but are released as only a patch that will translate the game when applied to the ROM image of such a game, so in other words, they are not distributing the game.

The problem is that once the translation is released, many ROM sites patch the game and distribute them readily translated, so I don’t really see any problem with fan-translated games.

#28

This is the answer I got…

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Sheesh people, take note already: I’m a GIRL . Not to mention that talking about prices was completely missing the point of my post: as I explicitly said, the point was NOT that some lower price is good, but that pressuring people to buy used is strange. Inability to read my post and instead preferring to just call me a pirate and be done with it doesn’t endear me to your cause. I do believe that people should pay for games; I make and sell games myself.
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And this is a new post that got into the topic today…

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hehe, i’ve been away trying to settle back into my home from college, but this conversation looked very interesting. I think people in this discussion have fully justified their positions in many ways. And i also have much respect for beholder in giving good facts to support his arguments, as well as the others for trying to argue and justify why hentai games aren’t worth too much the money. But it seems like there are certain views that haven’t been introduced yet, so I want to include that in this discussion.
To begin, i want to start off by saying why some H-games are not worth the money. I’m not much of a hentai game player (i’ve only seen some) but Spectator, you have to admit that games like the early viper series is not worth anywhere as much as the prices mentioned such as $40-50 with few texts and pictures that are not even comparable to the other advanced games that we see these days. But on the other hand, i see games like bikou 2 which is worth the money. So partially you are right, but there are some games out there that have quality that gets set back to the early 90s which the consumers in normal video game market will pay $5-10 (i’m not assuming peapre or the other company has bad quality games but such games do exist).
Plus, the whole thing with piracy is even worse in normal PC game producing companies than H-games. You said you were amused by people buying legit games for 90 dollars when they didn’t seem to be comparable to the H-games but that’s not really true. The only games that ranged in such prices for snes was mostly rpgs, and especially classics such as final fantasy. If you consider h-games to have better plots and twists and hours of play value compared to ff6 or other series, I must say you are more of an Hentai otaku than a gaming fan. Which then makes me think that you are not considering losses in normal game industry out there that produce thousands of titles each year as opposed to h-game market with maybe numbers within the two digit range. The best selling games in normal gaming industry number in the 100s. So the rest of games that they made lose large amounts of money and are pirated also. And maybe the cost to make one game is alot less than making 1 h-game, but I’m not really comparing their loss in profit by 1:1 ratio, rather 100:1.
Yet normal gaming industry still survives, despite its losses because they have decent marketting strategies. It won’t be easy for h-game industry to be on the same level with advertisements and etc. with normal games, but it seems like there are hardly any h-game advertisements that i’ve seen at all except going to their own official web page. I mean, any product selling companies have to have some form of advertisement set up, and usually this is one of the final and most important process in marketting, but this aspect seems to be very weak in h-game industry.
Along with this comment, h-game market hasn’t been too creative enough with their security issues. For instance, a successful international company such as blizzard had strictly reinforced the cd-key system by logging the keys in to their battle.net servers. This is probably the main advantage in having multiplayer online gaming experience. But this way, it ensures their profit as well devoted support. But H-games lack this type of security check ups.
All in all, h-game market still works and competes in the same level as a normal gaming market as long as it has the word “game” attached to it rather than pure pornography. Consumers who buy games in any form are still looking for a worth while gaming experience that is not just for viewing pleasures but for active interactions that results in enjoyment. Although many H-games have already have adopted this concept, it still is behind the trend as more and more games are entering online interactive plays with other users and create a fun, addictive environment. So perhaps if h-games can one day achieve this, or catch up to the current gaming ideas it will help provide better security for the creators, and gain more support, as well as apease the gamers who are looking for more unusual type of game play.

#29

Just out of curiosity, who’s Yoshi, and what article did he write on the history of Bishoujo games?

#30