I'm curious what sort of JVN sells for $20 or less when new. Only Planetarian and Higurashi comes to mind.Wintermoon wrote:I still go to great lengths to avoid spending more than $20 on a single Japanese visual novel.
Somewhat relevant, since the hentai market is sort of niche like JVNs... here's an old article from an old site (HD):
Currently even the pirate site Hongfire does not allow uploads of Lilith / Pixy games (along with JAST/Mangagamer licenses)... I'm assuming as a form of respect. I'm not well versed in the current situation of the hentai market, but I think it's not yet totally collapsed (despite lack of R1 licenses), it's on life support but will probably rebound after a while.Dire straits for the eroanime industry?
May 10th 2008 at 2:33 PM, by Shingo
Eroanime production company Anime Antenna employee Murakami Kouichi (村上恒一: producer - Mahou Shoujo Ai, The Guts!, Taimanin Asagi, other Pixy titles) made a post on the official Ani-An company blog on May 6th relating the news that Lilith Soft affiliate brand Pixy is in danger of financial collapse within the year, and that other major brands may soon follow.
He describes how Pixy was established with the goal of setting a revolutionary low price point for the OVAs it produced while retaining a high standard of quality, to make legitimate purchase of the product an option for all consumers. As a result profit margins on each sale became razor thin, but for Pixy’s first year of operation they were selling well enough that it seemed they could squeak by. Now, however, according to Murakami Pixy titles are being so widely pirated that their low-cost sales model is proving untenable. He makes the claim that if the current status quo continues, not only Pixy but adult anime as a whole may cease production within the year. Continued below:
Without solid numbers to back it up this seems to be an extravagant statement, but on the other hand I’ve often wondered how these companies do survive. If it were anyone other than Pixy saying this I’d tell them to try lowering their prices, but Pixy has already done what the industry had thought impossible in that regard.
I haven’t bought much eroanime in the past, but in the light of this post I’m going to start trying to put my money where my mouth is. Regardless of whether Murakami’s claim is true or not, I think companies like Lilith and Pixy who go out of their way to make their products economically accessible to fans deserve to be supported.
Pixy anime can be legally purchased via download at English DLsite.
This reminded me of an email that has the utmost relevance to what I'm doing today:Strum wrote: Consumers don't care how much work or how much money has gone into making a game, they only care about the end product and the price.
Plants vs Zombies had a budget of one million dollars. In contrast, I (and the commercial EVN creators here) have a budget of $5,000 or even less. Ideally, I would crowdsource with a popular idea. But I am a virtual unknown, so I must pay people to help me in my game. And the game requires lots of art assets. I still know that I cannot compete, but at least I want to create something that will net me more than just a pat on the back and an "A for effort"mikey wrote: The expectations, as you said in one of your posts, are really high now. It seems that casual games are going to go the way of hardcore games where you'll actually have to have very high production values. I don't know how much one can rely on a low-cost game going viral (and thus make money, like Angry Birds), it's much too random. In fact, for 20 USD I expect a perfect 2D game with as much eyecandy as the eye can see.
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In many ways this is kind of saddening, because in the end it only comes down to how the casual game looks. If it doesn't look good, most people will not even touch it
The gaming (and to some extent, the animation) industry is well on its way to collapsing... the recent news proclaiming that Warner Brothers canned This is Vegas which put $50 million down the drain. In a few years the only remaining players might be Blizzard, Valve, and Nintendo. We have the following factors that do not help mitigate the situation:
*consumers have excessively high expectations but excessively low budgets (or so they claim)
*studios being risk-averse and not making games that will not sell because they were so expensive to produce with the polish that consumers expect.
*studios and projects dying left and right (not to mention the passing of creative people like Satoshi Kon who treated anime as a medium, not a genre -- and it is hoped we'll have more people who will treat games so it can finally have its Citizen Kane equivalent)
In summary it's the worst of times, but also the best of times, since only during major upheavals will smaller players get a chance to slip through the cracks and make their statements before the giants gobble everything up and more firmly entrench their monopolies.
It's really tough to reconcile a niche where 1,000 copies sold is considered a major success with a multi-million behemoth industry where they sell millions of copies just to break even, all competing for the attention of people within the $5-$60 price points.
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(O-kay, that's about the gist of my recent brain-fart.)