Update: Hevoluson’s blog. Unfortunately still no user responses at the time of this posting. http://hevoluson.blog87.fc2.com/blog-entry-118.html
My Thoughts
These are truly disastrous circumstances. Paying customers are being punished for the ineptitude of non-paying ‘customers’. This announcement has made me think a lot about what we can do to rescue the industry. I love the visual novel medium and I think MangaGamer has been a phenomenal effort and I know a lot of people out there care for the industry (Such as the 10 or so that post regularly on the mangagamer forums).
Indifference is our biggest problem. People don’t care whether visual novels live or die. If they die, they will just move onto something else. Some are of the opinion that as long as we have fan translations, we will be fine. But the current matter is that unacknowledged fan translations make Japan spit on us. They make them enter edit wars with us. They C&D us. They ban our IPS. The hoards of otaku cry ‘thieving foreigners’. And what is MOST important is that, they make the Japanese companies give up on the idea of ever expanding to the West.
http://www.siliconera.com/2010/09/12/koihime-musou-goes-silent-demo-out-now/
http://www.sankakucomplex.com/2010/09/12/mangagamer-silences-koihime-musou/
Extra stuff:
- Atlas @ vndb.org
“There might be something larger at work here.”
“The various Japanese companies that pooled their resources together to form MangaGamer may be discovering that this is not as profitable a venture as they thought it would be…By setting this unreasonably high bench mark (2000 copies), those that control MG may be carefully setting up an eventual closing up of the company…(saying) we tried but there just isn’t a market for these products outside Japan and shut it all down.” - Moogy @ gemot
“It’s simply the reality of the market. Licensing and releasing eroge in English is not cost-efficient and, at this rate, never will be. Not being able to afford to license the voices is a sad inevitability, not some conscious decision on either side’s end to screw over the customers or whatever.” - 264 comments on the MangaGamer blog as of this posting
Kouryuu battled it on for hours and hours on the blog, posting a total of 27 times over 4 days. Lots of reasonable arguments against many many angry fans, such as this one.
Enraged Tsumachi:
“Well done Nexton, I hope you enjoy your 100 copy sales. This is one of the worst ideas I have ever had the displeasure of hearing about.”
