Anyone hoping for Alicesoft might as well stop now, they’ve started blocking foreign IP’s. Bearing that in mind I’d vote for Eushully, Giga and Softhouse Chara.
@Ojamajo: I thought the fuss was title/release sensitive, not related to producer or publisher. Still you’re probably right there, but i’ll keep hoping.
@kyrt: Thank you for informing (and yes, Rapelay was boring). The reason behind me mentioning Battle Raper is because I thought h-scenes would be good intermezzo between fights within an arcade styled fighting game. I look at it as modern Variable Geo, with 3d graphics etc.
By the way, is Giga we’re talking here (the Baldr titles) the same Giga who released Variable Geo titles years ago?
Can we make it clear right now that blocking foreign IPs has absolutely nothing to do with whether a company will be available for licensing? While I’ll agree that there are no present concrete licensing deals companies that have blocked foreign IPs, this is more due to the fact that there are so few licensed companies and so few companies blocking foreign IPs. It’s only a matter of time
Alicesoft has already said they don’t see it as a viable option right now. They turned either Jast down because they were worried about more or less the feminazis. The whole Rapelay incident is the biggest reason they have decided to stay away from the english market right now (that and the profits do not outweigh the risks). I believe Black Cyc said more or less the same thing. The Rapelay incident did cause problems and as such considering both Black Cyc and Alicesoft have a lot of rape and sometimes underage characters they’ve decided that the risk right now is too great. Give it time for people to forget about the rapelay incident…hell Americans in particular tend to forget about things within 5 years. Right now it is just too soon and they do not wish to take a chance. There is also the fact that Alicesoft probably knows that their games have fan-translation patches (at least for sengoku rance) and at this time do not see the gain being higher than the risk. Like I said give it a few years and maybe a company (jast, mangagamer, or some new one) will have better luck with either alicesoft or black cyc or similar companies.
I’d like to see the source where Alicesoft gave a reason for not wanting to deal with JAST. But yes, JAST has indeed mentioned that Alicesoft turned them down.
I’ll contribute my usual:
Eushully
Softhouse Chara
Ali–gah I guess I’ll settle for Giga. Though I seem to remember JAST saying that was a no-go too.
That was not the sole reason I claimed that a deal wasn’t going to happen, I also took into account that they turned Jast down rather emphatically. If it had just been the IP block then I wouldn’t count them out, but combined with their refusal to work with Jast, it sort of makes it clear that they don’t want anything to do with a western market anytime soon.
Yeah, the issue there was that Giga didn’t want to release their games uncensored, but at least they showed interest. And who knows, maybe now that bigger name companies are testing the waters they might be more inclined to join in.