Rance games are very good, but so are basically all of Alicesoft games.
Since it’s one of the “big” guys since the very beginning whose popularity (and games’ quality) never went down (contrary to, say, Èlf or F&C), I suppose they make enough money with the Japanese market to not want to bother with the English one… even more when it doesn’t seem they would make as much (as with the Japanese market).
And extra-work. And extra-headaches. Meaning extra-costs. If the foreseeable gain doesn’t counterbalance the investment, it’s not worth even starting.
Opportunity cost … it’s all about opportunity cost: what you could have got, had you spent the resources elsewhere. Right now the US market is a fraction the size of the Japanese market and games sell for half what they do in Japan. That’s almost an order of magnitude difference in income.
So it makes sense to take that money, and either put it towards making more games aimed at the Japanese market, or taking existing ones and making them better games, so they will sell more. The payoff from such moves is immediate: more games means more money, and higher stability (a flop is less able to sink the whole company), and better games are less likely to flop and will sell more.
If focusing on the English market means you can put out one less game per year, you’ve foregone one new game for a business deal that will bring around a tenth of the income per title. If you can put out 10 titles per year in America for that one game’s worth of capacity, then you come out ahead; but that is hard to do (not to mention so many games coming out for such a small market runs the risk of flooding, lowering sales per title even more). Add to that, that games with actual gameplay (as opposed to ADVs) are a LOT harder to make, debug, and localize … and you are talking about a large outlay of cash for marginal benefit.
Then there’s the fact that the US market is in its infancy, but the Japanese market is relatively mature. The US market could become huge, much huger than the Japanese market even on sheer population figures alone – but in Japan, someone who would like these games has already had ample opportunity to buy them and is already a customer. Very few people in the West who would like these games have been exposed. Right now, the market is veeeeery small, with considerable potential for growth. It takes a lot of time to build a market for this kind of thing (look at anime and manga!). So the US market represents a very risky market-creation strategy: spend money (localizing ain’t free) that is very close to a waste right now, on what is essentially a gamble that over many years a big enough customer base can eventually be built to make it worthwhile.
If you win, then you make way more money than you ever did before, and all of a sudden are more or less assured that you can continue to exist. If you fail, you’ve poured money into an investment making you a tenth what you could have made playing it safe. You don’t make big bets on risky propositions like this lightly, so companies like Alicesoft with more to lose are going to play it safe. Especially when you haven’t got a lot of capital you can afford to lose (as many of these companies do not).
I always though that when a licensee licenses a game from a eroge company, the only thing that said company does is provide the licensee with the original game and dev tools. This is all pretty much minimum cost. How this could impair their development of current games? I just don’t see it.
In order to solve your apparent paradox - let’s just try to imagine that you might have thought wrong all the time! :roll:
Another fun fact: some Japanese companies don’t remotely care about the Western game market. They’re not in the industry to become multimillionaires - just make ero games and earn a living from it. Selling exclusively to Japan does that for them, and they’re quite happy with the status-quo. Big American game companies do exactly the same thing - for example Bioware or Codemasters doesn’t release their PC titles in Japan. Would they like to make more $$$? Sure. Do they wanna actually put an effort to do it? Nope. It’s not an aversion to money… its an aversion to more work, when they’ve got quite enough to do already.
American Eroge (AE) contacts Japanese Sexfest (JS), showing an interest to release their 2006 uber title, Succubi Twincest Battle Rape Nuns in English.
First there’s the negotiation phase. AE sends its people to JS. Vice versa JS might send their people to checkout AE. During this, JS will undoubtedly want to see what quality work AE does with translations. Someone with decision making power (or has the ear of someone who does), has to checkout a few of AE’s titles, and see if they’re “worthy” enough.
That takes time.
After this is done, there’s the actual contract signing. This will take some high level people to be involved, because $$$ is serious business. No loopholes, agreements to cover liability, etc. For some eroge companies, the people in charge of running the studio are also the people who write title scenarios (or at least approve the scripts).
More lost time.
If all goes well and the deal is signed. JS gives AE the development tools, master files of the game, etc. AE begins their translation work… but someone has to do the “uncensoring” of the artwork. Sure, AE might hire their own artists to do it ¬ñ but it’s just as likely that JS will want to have it done right, and get the original artist to draw the genitals and penetration that were omitted intentionally. Plus AE might have questions about how the dev tools work… maybe a LOT of questions if its poorly designed (case in point: just ask any poor soul who has to work on the PSP or PS3). JS is gonna need to provide tech support… and that might require the dude who actually made the game engine.
More lost time.
Yadda, yadda, yadda… kinda boring myself writing this, so I’ll stop here. Needless to say, if porting games over to the West as quick and cheap, don’t you think Japanese eroge companies would have already done it themselves? It’s not quick. It’s not cheap. Hell… setup costs (i.e. making a branch office in the US), probably would cost as much as their budget for two or three new titles back in Japan.
Oh yeah, how could I forget the overhead costs. The necessary evil of middle men, management and legal folk.
On the topic of uncensoring, what is supposed to happen is that JS should already have the original uncensored version before it got censored. (Sometimes they don’t.) A while back I read that there is a law in Japan that requires companies to submit unmodified and uncensored original material to any foreign licensee. I am not sure if this applies to just anime or all production material (movies, video games etc). A good example when this wasn’t possible was when Sogna folded. They no longer had the original material, so when Viper Paradise was licensed, the content remained censored.
On the topic of dev work A lot of the games (mostly the ADV ones) actually reuse the same game engines. So most of the times, this reduces the dev costs. But I still get your point.
What no one has mentioned yet is that a lot of Japanese are still very conservative and don’t want to have anything to do with foreigners. It would not suprise me one bit if Alicesoft was one of those companies with quite conservative staff. (You can sorta tell from the stories in their games).
Or the programming staff has to make bugfixes. Narg’s example assumed the US firm was handling that kind of coding; often it’s done by the original Japanese company. And they do fun things, like use ‘,’ (the American comma) as a special command the way HTML uses stuff like <>. Works just fine for them, because hey, they never use English commas in their games, right? Fan translations can just skip commas, turn them to semicolons, whatever they want; it’s a fan translation, if people don’t like it tough, why does the fannotation group care? People trying to sell the game have to care about this. Well, now you have to get the engine changed, which is time your programmer isn’t using on other things.
I know for a fact many of Peach Princess’ early delays were due to code issues that they had to wait for the Japanese company to have time to get around to fixing. And we know how fond we were of the four year wait for Little My Maid. 
Yep. Sometimes they haven’t GOT the artwork uncensored – they didn’t keep the master originals, for very old titles. In general, old data is, well, old – I get the feeling Japanese eroge makers aren’t terribly big on things like source control … so stuff for completed projects just kind of … floats around. Maybe they can find it. It requires work to track down stuff like that.
… Wait, what? You heard what? Uh, I’m pretty sure that’s not right. They have laws requiring censorship on domestically sold merchandise, which means PP games cannot be legally sold to Japan. In fact PP’s contracts with the Japanese makers spell this out; if PP sold to Japan, any Japanese firm dealing with PP would get in serious trouble with the government, and so the contracts are drawn up such that PP can’t. Perhaps this is what you were thinking of?
If you’re wondering why all (or almost all) localized games are uncensored … the answer is simple enough: no one in the US likes censorship, so if the product is censored they are offended. Therefore, censored product won’t sell if it’s obvious that it’s censored. You can delete scenes (such as from the US release of Can Can Bunny Extra OVAs), but get in-your-face about it with censorship pixellation … and nobody will buy.
Undeniably some companies just said flat-out “No”, and when pressed said “The money doesn’t interest us at all. We want nothing to do with you, please go.” (Another thread cited Illusion, I believe.) But Alicesoft is a big name, and the OTHER problem with them (besides the fact their games would be harder to localize) is that they would want a lot of money for the rights. Big names are worth more money – I mean, JK Rowling wouldn’t seriously consider an offer to translate Harry Potter into ohletssay Swahili, on the expectation they might sell like twenty thousand copies, and maybe make half a million profit.