The massive turn around of MangaGamer

Visual Novel Community Archive, 2000-2009
#1

This time last year, there was the new company named MangaGamer, which at the time was pretty much a joke. They got a couple decent titles announced, but their initial releases had some of the worse translations that the English game market had ever known. They created such a huge initial bad impression that it was assumed they would be dead in 6 months. They continued to be plagued with problems, massive delays, and constantly releasing games only to take them offline for a month the following day. However their translation quality continued to improve, and they listened to all the complaints and tried to take the best actions they could. Eventually they did get decent releases of Da Capo and Suika, but they had the other problems mentioned above with these titles. Then they were forced to take down two games because of the conditions in Japan, one of the games being one that they were preparing to release. Then they went off line and said they were redoing their website, many thought the worse at this time.

However, when they came online, their new website was respectable (with an awesome mascot), and they had a big time release with KiraKira, one of the best Visual Novels ever to be commercially released in English. However the script still had some issues, but they had improved. Then came Anime Expo and they made more huge announcements, Shuffle and Higurashi, titles that appeal to more than just the small Visual Novel community. With Shuffle, they shortly announced a release date, which stayed constant until release, and then when it came out there were very few issues with the translation, with it flowing naturally with minimum errors. In addition it is probably the most known eroge ever to be released in English, thanks to the wildly popular anime. The general impression, which at one time had been “lol what a joke” has now became to see them as somewhat respectable, and has only been improving. I for one am amazed with this turn around, it is rather rare to get a second chance if you leave an awful impression with your first, but it looks like they have done just that.

#2

What needs improvement now is their marketing. They do themselves a disservice by localizing a game with mainstream appeal, and then not marketing it whatsoever.

#3

Nah, I think they know it could be dangerous outside Japan. I agree with the opinion that heavy marketing is really not good for eroge and that the less feminazis know about it, the better. Eroge can never become mainstream and most fans of Higurashi or Shuffle anime don’t probably care about some visual novels anyway…

#4

I don’t think massive is the right word to use, since most of their improvement has been reactive due to negative feedback received.
Good games like Kira kira and Suika are helping MG become a real alternative, but I still feel their reliability is ranking low on the current eroge audience.

#5

The more angry feminists know that there is MORE to hentai than “3d Rape Stalk And Kill”, the better. You do eroge no service by acting like it’s something that should be ashamed of and hidden.

There are plenty of angry feminists that you can never make happy, there are plenty of people offended by the very idea of “dating games” and complaining about objectification or the “helpless girl in need of rescue” commonly put forth in some titles. However, when you make visible the games that are not so different from romance novels, you dial down the amount of general outrage that can be summoned up.

Romance novels are mainstream. Heck, ‘titty mags’ are pretty mainstream in Europe. There’s no reason eroge can’t be. Probably not “Suck my dick or die!”, though. :slight_smile:

Anyway, if nobody knows about your product, nobody can buy it, and you go out of business. Quite simple.

#6

They do need to market better. Marketing isn’t about throwing money, it’s about knowing where to throw it at so that you get the most out of your money. I would like to have seen them at Anime Central as living in the midwest going to a coastal convention isn’t so easy (maybe next year I can get a press pass to Anime Expo). It isn’t like its a local convention as it’s above the 10k mark which defines it as a major convention. Although TBH, I don’t know if I’ll go next year because they have serious issues.

#7

Well, since they currently have two games with a popular anime base then why not take advantage of that and put some advertisements up in some anime magazines like whatever magazine it was that replaced Newtype USA (god, I miss it) or Anime Insider?

#8

There has not been a massive turn around. They have continued to make themselves appear inept with the way in which they repeatedly accidentally “released” titles, and they have said they still are not making money. Mangagamer hasn’t even finished digging itself out of the pit - playing Da Capo, I can say that the translation is mostly adequate, but does not seem to get across all the nuances that seem to be contained in the original. Humor is hugely dependent on polished delivery, which Da Capo does not really seem to have a lot of. And they’re still pushing the ridiculous downloadables-only because-we-can’t-afford-to-do-it-properly angle.

Massive improvement, sure. They have definitely improved quite a bit. But it’s only a turn around after you’re out of the woods, and they aren’t :slight_smile:

#9

Both of those magazines are dead.

#10

The jump in translation from a game like Tasty Shafts to Kira Kira is pleasantly surprising! I agree about their marketing, or lack thereof. They’re probably just now really picking up steam, but I didn’t even know the company existed until I did a lot of digging for translated visual novels.

#11

I don’t view MG as having “turned around.” They ARE making noticeable improvements, especially their website. I think they should consider releasing more download for their older releases, and perhaps even samples. i recognize that bandwidth costs money, but if MG is sticking with a download-only distribution model, then they definitely need to use the internet even more via down loadable goodies.

#12

If there’s one thing Jast/Peach Princess could learn from MangaGamer, it’s to change their system so that their digital download games don’t need to be manually billed, causing the (up to) 24 hour delay before you can download the games. I mean, I don’t know of a single web shop out there that offers digital download games that won’t let you download immediately after purchasing. Is this a Japanese company thing, or is just the Jast/J-list/PP (and G-Collections I guess?) web shop infrastructure archaic?

#13

I know a few that require about 5-10 minutes.

#14

I’m not so sure B173 M3. Given that purchases are mostly done online, the gender of the purchaser is generally not known. So it is hard to tell how many women are buying these games. Especially since even the name of the person receiving the game may not be the person who is going to play the game. For instance, I get my games through someone else’s card so that they get free airline miles.

#15

Of course nobody can completely tell for sure from just online sales. That’s why the next best thing that anyone can rely on is by the content and variety of the titles that are already available in the market. For an entrant like MangaGamer, if they have to determine a general idea of what the overall market is like and determine which audience they need to focus on, they’d have to ask, “what kind of games are our competitors mostly selling?” and “who were they designed to cater to?”

Right now, the R1 VN market is selling mostly “dating-sim” type games that where the player takes the role of a male character and they always have him getting into graphically sexual situations with either one or more of the game’s various female characters at certain points in the story. Additionally, there are hardly any other games out there that feature a female main character, nor contain sexual content that is presented in a way so as to suggest that it was deliberately designed to provoke a hetero/homosexual female’s arousal, nor feature any story elements that could be disticintively be identified as being designed for a female audience. From a business perspective, they can establish that the fact that the content of games currently in the R1 market indicate that they were most likely made with a heterosexual male audience in mind, and because there aren’t any other types titles being sold, especially in such a high-risk market such as this, it can be reasonably assumed that the market probably happens to be disproportionately comprised of heterosexual males.

#16

Update on the discrimination at AX2009 matter:

I was in a PM discussion with EvoSpace, the moderator of the official MG forum. He talked to Mangagamer and here was their response:

“There’s the possibility of causing a problem by actually handing it to them. It’s difficult. Let’s give them to females who requests them.”

So the whole incident seems to have been a result of miscommunication. You can imagine how it played out:
MG supervisor (to freebie distributor): Hand the DVDs to all the men coming in, but not the women.

Implicitly, that meant, “Don’t give the DVDs to men that refuse. Give them to women that request them.” Of course, if any of this exchange occurred in English (the distributor at least was fluent), all bets are off, because the instructions were likely horribly garbled.

So, my interpretation of their response is that MG just wanted to avoid offending curious females who didn’t know about the games. They weren’t afraid of feminists specifically out to get them (who would’ve asked specifically for the DVDs), and they didn’t seem to be concerned about a limited stock of DVDs. At least one freebie distributor misunderstood, and began refusing to give the DVDs to females to requested them. Since some females obtained them without a problem, there was either multiple distributors or the distributor eventually realized her error.

By the way, EvoSpace was apologetic, and he doesn’t think future freebies will be targeted at males but not females (i.e., they’ll be offered to all visitors whether they request them or not).

#17

Well, this can be forgiven; given the cultural and verbal boundaries they had to deal with. But even so, some of us gamers like to have a physical copy of the games we buy (in case our hard drive gets fried or whatever). And since Mangagamer doesn’t sell their games this way AND they also utilize the godawful DRM system, they unfortunately lose (one would assume) a decent amount of would-be-customers.

#18

However, there are some games that have been translated that target a female audience - one that comes to mind is Yo-Jin-Bo, that was translated by Hirameki. Jast started selling both digital and physical copies of the game, and I think they sold out of physical copies faster than they expected - it’d be interesting to see how popular/well Yo-Jin-Bo is selling.

#19

There’s always an exception to everything. But for every title like Yo-Jin-Bo that gets released, there’s at least 10 or so titles out there that cater to a male audience. The fact remains that there are far more titles released here that are catered to a male audience as opposed to a female audience–Mangagamer can’t possibly not take that into account if they’re trying to determine who is the best audience to focus their efforts to on.

#20

To throw some stats into the mix: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/jlist.com

Take a look at the demographics for browsers of J-List. Sure, the data collection doesn’t have particularly high fidelity, but it confirms a lot of what we already know: the main target demographic is 18-24 year-old males from the US. There’s also data for Mangagamer, JAST, Otakuism, etc…but the sample size for those sites is so low (because they get so little traffic) that the data probably isn’t very reliable. Regardless, J-list browsers are probably a close match demographically to potential and actual eroge buyers, which are the groups we ultimately care about. It doesn’t bode well for the female-oriented eroge market that J-list browsers (JList being a Japanocentric site with a slant towards adult goods) are almost entirely males.