This was much better than the poor excuses of podcast that were previously done.
Nice interview, I gained quite a bit of info. 8)
Kinda sad about Raidy III, Hirameki and like.
I don’t mind uncensored images that much, as long as the game is “good”. Also a bit disappointed about Them dismissing all age games. Still its their prerogative.
Nice info about Mangagamer 8)
Also they kind of dodged the question on which games they’d like to bring 
They came right out and said it, I thought? They said that Princess Waltz had done very well for them, but that CFA had done even better.
But yeah, the implication was there that the “Did somebody order a pizza?” eroge have the double whammy of selling better and being easier to do. But I think if PP only went after those titles they’d probably find fewer long-term fans.
What I find strange is that he said Peach Princess used to be an independent outfit that they did distribution for. That is not at all my understanding of what happened. So far as I know it was always Peter, he just started a new company after Jast USA stopped being relevant (Jast in Japan went out of business).
They said something along the lines of “Princess Waltz did well, and CFA did very well”. I don’t believe a direct comparison was made (poor for a Final Fantasy game would be outstanding for a Saga Frontier game, for example), but the implication was there.
Well there’s erotica and then there’s pornography. Erotica is sex as an art. Porn is sex as stimulation.
Porn seems to do better than erotica. Remember when adult movies actually had a plot? I mean it would often be dumb like a plumber coming to clean pipes (heh), but there was dialog and undressing and a decorative set. Now 90% of the stuff I see, is some girl sitting naked on a couch in an empty room, exclaiming that she’s ready to get her brains fucked out.
Before the whole economy crash, I remember the adult movie industry, trying to make multimillion dollar projects with fancy costumes, women who could partly act, and some decent attempt at a plot. They got lots praise for raising the bar, but ultimately they failed at leaving an impact. A friend put it best: “I could spend $30 to watch a 2 hour DVD with 30 minutes of sex and 1.5 hours of good looking but half ass plot… or I could watch a 2 hour DVD video of nothing but cheap ass sex. For $30 I’m buying the cheap ass sex.”
I don’t see why eroge would be different. There are many of us who see it as an erotica, but I’d be shock if there wasn’t more who thought of it as pornography. Thus they want more sex for their buck.
Still… because JAST isn’t obligated to release their sales numbers (unlike traditional video games), it’s hard to know exactly how the words “good” and “very well” mean in raw numerics. Does good mean 1,000 sold or does good mean 10,000 sold? We’ll probably never know. 
This may be true, but in terms of sales rankings there’s no different markets between the two and you can directly compare sales. Why, then, aren’t the ‘cheap ass sex’ eroges selling the 50K or 100K titles that studios like August can manage even with their halfassed plots? From what I can tell Lilith is happy if they can sell 10K =P
Furthermore, ‘cheap sex’ is not cheaper to make in terms of eroge. A lot of cheap H games have a fairly respectable CG count (they have to! Otherwise they don’t sell) while a more story-and-character-focused title can get away with the exact same amount… and sell 5-10 times the copies. At full price (9,240?). You can’t sell a sexromp for 9,240? unless it’s something like an Atelier Kaguya game, which easily costs as much or more to make as equivalent story-focused titles, since they’re often quite long and contain a huge amount of content (we’re talking 40-100 H scenes). You won’t have me believe that’s cheap. The ones that do make the lower-budget sexromps don’t even try to tell them for anywhere near 9,240?.
If you gave me a bunch of money and instructed me to hire out whatever set of scenario writers and artists I want, providing an overall direction, to gain the maximum feedback, I’d always go story-focused. Yes, it would be story-focused with a whole lot of H content, but it would be story-focused. There’s no way I’d try to make a short, low-budget literally-nothing-but-sex title-- or even five of them, because it wouldn’t be profitable. They don’t sell. What sells in that market is stuff like the Softhouse Seal and Norn games that do actually put more of a focus on the story than you’d probably think.
EDIT: Some points Ignosco raised:
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If you look at the getchu sales rankings for 2009 the majority of the titles are story-focused, even if they have a decent quantity of ero (like #7) and typically would not be attractive for those merely after the eroscenes. The first true ero-centric title on the list, in position #24, is Syrup’s Machigurumi no Wana. This in particular is interesting, because while it is an ero-centric title that did well, it doesn’t work with your assertion that such things are cheap to make. Machigurumi definitely wasn’t. The game contains 112 H scenes, many with unique CG, and it’s a long story, in part thanks to the H scenes themselves being quite long. I’m pretty sure Machigurumi cost more to make than 80% of the titles on the list, in particular facing a rather humiliating defeat to things like Kiss x Maou x Darjeeling.
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In the low-budget area, NTR (???) titles are rather popular, but by their very nature can’t be mostly porn-- the scenarios they rely on to do well as far as sales go require a fairly lengthy amount of setup and character development.
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Going back to Softhouse Seal, even their titles tend to contain non-ero CGs, as well as OP songs and videos. These seem like a rather unnecessary expense given that they aren’t strictly related to the sex content, and for a studio as ‘efficient’ as Seal I don’t see them including anything that isn’t strictly beneficial to their sales.
Quick summary:
Even if people PREFER to have more sex, story-oriented is what they BUY. Even eroero does better if more work goes into the story. And it can be a crappy halfassed story, like Machigurumi no Wana’s. That’s fine. But nobody wants pure H scenes- otherwise Love x Evolution would have appeared on the getchu sales charts. It’s literally just sex (and apparently very good, too; beautifully rendered 3D the likes of which I’ve never even seen before in eroge; makes Illusion’s stuff look like the polygonal mess it is). And it didn’t.
Interpretation:
Therefore, I think JAST should think about bringing more of the eroero eroge over. See, let’s say there’s four kinds of eroge:
#1: Bad story-oriented eroge
#2: Good story-oriented eroge
#3: Bad ero-oriented eroge
#4: Good ero-oriented eroge
JAST sells 3 of these categories, but none of #4 (which has lead some people to tragically believe #4 doesn’t exist, but let me assure you, it does)- unfortunately, this is partly due to the companies JAST has partnerships with. Most of JAST’s eroero lineup is occupied by Trabulance and Sekilala games, which were never highly regarded. If JAST could get some good sex-oriented eroge there would surely be a market for it, right?
I wonder. If JAST has up until now sold with great success bad ero-oriented games, there’s actually no real reason to switch to good ero-oriented games (which would probably cost them much more money). They would probably switch if selling good ero-oriented games would bring them more money (ie if those games would sell more), but I don’t think this is the case at the moment.
Well, they sell a lot more in Japan, and considering that JAST has never sold a good ero-oriented game they don’t exactly have data to work with, do they? I see no reason why you’d immediately assume they wouldn’t sell better.
You’re right. But then that’s Japan: where eroge has evolved into a relative mainstream media. It practically owns a part of Tokyo. Also most Japanese AV’s still keep the story focus part. But in America, porn took a different path of evolution, where raw sex sells better than artistic erotica. Naturally it’s part of the mentality and corporations that guide it - Larry Flint will happily tell you that Hustler sells pure smut, and he has no plans to change that - but if smut didn’t sell, Playboy would be the only porn mag around (which caters to the erotica circles).
Maybe. I’m not doubting that it could… but maybe it would sell with fewer numbers. Can’t really say without official numbers telling that X many of a story eroge was sold, and X many of a pure sexfest was sold. Has Jast ever made a “top ten list” of how their titles have sold (not specific numbers; just a list)? What’s the best selling eroge Jast has ever released? What’s the second best? What’s the worst eroge Jast has ever released? What’s the second worst? What were the “average” titles? What years sold the most titles? What years sold the least titles? We could make better guesses if we knew that.
Only the red names know the real answers, and if they choose not to share it, I’m sure they have their reasons. Business secrets and all that.
With the comparison of porn and eroge, suddenly this came to mind:
Ron Jeremy is like a Porn God - he’s screwed thousands of beautiful women (even twins). I think his comments are kinda being taken out of context. Ron is a huge supporter of pornography and given many debates against censorship. He’s also did work on the Celebrity Deathmatch and Leisure Suit Larry games, so he’s certainly not against violent or adult themed games.
He could have worded his statement better… but this isn’t Ron saying video games should be banned. He just saying that violent and sex driven video games are mainstream accepted, and that general porn gets more flack while being more harmless. It’s his point of view. He’s not saying he wants video games to be regulated or anything like that. He’s gone on the record to say he hates the Internet, but he’s also gone on the record saying he hates censorship on the Internet.
Ron Jeremy is really our friend, not our enemy. He has own opinions on stuff, but his goals for porn and erotica aren’t too different from ours.
When I talked to him at Comic Con he implied that The Sagara Family was one of if not the highest selling game they’ve had. Not exactly official but it wouldn’t surprise me. I think I’ll ask him this time around if he can name a top three or something like that so we can get an idea of what games have done the best so far.
I think it’s safe to assume if Peter could get his hands on the rights to Atelier Kaguya titles, they would sell a lot. More than for example Kango Shicyauzo 1 ever did (either by itself or as part of the double pack). Even though they’d have to charge more for it initially. Over the lifetime of the title, they’d sell way more. A.Kaguya’s art is just that much better.
Of course, the question is how much money would be required to get them on board (if it’s even possible at any price). Nitro+ did, perhaps there’s hope for other big names, but I doubt it at this point.
A long time ago, they announced that Brave Soul had become their best-selling ever. Then they had to retract it, as it seems they hadn’t counted correctly and the original XChange was still beating it. For a long time XChange 1 was the cheapest game available from Peach Princess. In between that, and it also being one of the first games ever released, XC1 has a pretty high sales figure.
Of course, Peter went and dropped prices basically across the board a while back. That probably caused sales of a lot of the back catalog to pick up. But still, XC1 had that low price for 8 or 9 years.
It wouldn’t surprise me if measured in total sales, XC1 is still near the top. If you measure it in other ways (total sales divided by # months available, say - or highest ever sales in 1 month) it’s probably a lot lower in the rankings. All depends how you define “done the best so far”.
that is why i would bet during con season jast will announce x-change a2 and 3 methods
I agree with Narg. The fallacy there is the implicit assumption that the American market is similar to the Japanese market. It’s very clear that this isn’t the case.
I can agree with this. The question is, does JAST have the contacts in place to make this happen? I’m sure JAST would love to bring over high budget sex romps. That they haven’t yet speaks of problems on the supply side.
Oh, definitely this. Currently I feel that JAST’s core userbase cares more about ero-heavy titles than ones with plot(makes me afraid how Demonbane’s sales will turn out). If the sex wasn’t such a huge deal for them, I don’t think there’d be any qualms about releasing game with mosaiced CGs.
Eroges/visual novels/bishoujo games are still pretty new market in west, just like Peter pointed out during interview. It will take some time for the titles with less ero to start selling more.
…If that will even happen, that is.
Although I’d still like to hear how games like Crescendo and Yume Miru Kusuri sold for JAST. Easier to make comparison that way.
I think there’d be problems finiding a suitable title from their current contacts. One recent possibility, Guilty’s Last Waltz (released November 09) did rather well on the Japanese side, and there are plenty of other Guilty/Anim titles that probably wouldn’t be too hard or expensive to license (also some early ruf titles, but they’d probably be too old and generally problematic to pick up as well) [Edit: I should add that there are far better ero-focused titles available from other companies, so good is certainly a matter of perspective.]. However all of them are pretty much pure insult titles, and although they’d sell very well, given that JAST hasn’t released a title like that for a very long time, it doesn’t seem like they’d want to go anywhere near the genre now. I can’t think of any good lighter ero-focused titles from within their current contacts either.
Trust me, you don’t need to remember me how much better is the art in A. Kaguya games. The point is, let’s say there are 1000 eroge buyers out there. Let’s say that 750 of those buyers buy only sexromps, the other 250 are instead mainly interested in story-driven games.
JAST releases Cosplay Fetish Academy, it sells 750 copies.
JAST releases Prima Stella. The game is at least so good to interest even a part of those that usually have an interest only in story driven games (also considering that, as far as I know, Prima Stella has also a decent story), so it sells 850 copies. Is it worth it?
What I’m trying to say it’s that at the moment people will buy practically everything that comes out in english. So, I don’t think that selling better stuff will increase sales that much.
Now, things could change if Mangagamer started selling good ero games. If that was the case, JAST would definitely need to improve the quality of their releases, or lose customers. Unfortunately, this not seem the case at the moment (they’re selling good story-oriented games, but the same old crap when it comes to ero).
(sorry, possibly a bit off topic) Prima Stella isn’t a game you’d buy solely for the story, but I think if you combine the story/characters/atmosphere and reasonably strong writing there’s plenty to like about it even if you skip through all the ero-scenes. Furthermore, while there’s still a lot of ero in the main story, almost half of the scenes are in an omake section (including scenes with sub-heroines, 3P etc.) so they don’t need to sidetrack/weaken the story by working those into it. (I think it’s an ideal approach for this sort of eroge). If it was marketed right, I think it could possibly sell 900+ copies as while there are individual titles that outdo Prima Stella in every aspect (ero included) very few manage to integrate everything as well.
If they are willing to consider doujin games, Iceno! is the best ero-focused game (a bit borderline though - 14 scenes in 4 hours) I’ve played so far, and from what I’ve heard another Artemis eroge, Ane Summer! 2 is even better.