Okay. Easily confused Taka time.
Question 5 asks “What other company’s games do you want to see released in the west?”
This is asking for games by other companies in Japan, right?
Yes? What else would it be?
I don’t know. The wording of the question was just weird, so I didn’t feel confident that I had read it correctly x.x
I also didn’t know if they meant Publishers or Developers, so I just chose studios that self-publish their VNs >.>
I guess they just left it open to whatever you wanna put there~
I wonder if Key’s new-found willingness to localize is stemming from Japan’s recent crackdown on pirating (specifically in the anime/manga industry)
How do you figure?
Well I don’t know if you heard but within the past couple days the Japanese government along with many producers and distributors have launched a campaign against pirating, especially overseas. And the way most people outside Japan get their VNs is pirating, so…
Who knows, maybe Key has just suddenly realized our great love for them.
It’s probably a coincidence. But there is an emerging pattern over the last 12 months of Japanese Visual Novels making it overseas when it was otherwise not happening at all.
Yeah now that you mention it, it has been happening a lot lately. And it doesn’t really matter why anyways, its just really great thing
I just put in Leaf and Circus lol
If you ask me, it’s because of the declining sales of Visual Novels in the west. It’s nothing compared to what it was 10 years ago, nobody plays them anymore. So they’re looking to the west, who seem eager to eat up this strange new medium from Japan.
Dat mobile market is taking over, and Key just can’t break into it.
People there are even less likely to buy PCs than they were before, and the PC Market was already small.
Kids would rather play outside or with toys. Teens would want to get away from the family and spend time with schoolmates. Adults would rather have something to take on the commute to work.
There’s little room for hour-long Visual Novels in the average shopper’s life over there. The west is a lot more lax about those things, and PC is quickly becoming the big thing now. A rapidly expanding market in the west, and a rapidly declining market in the east.
I doubt the campaign has much to do with it overall. It’s being announced after VN publishers started to make the jump over to the west, and the actual campaign is pretty… bad? That’s probably the best description for it 
If western governments haven’t managed to deal with it, the Japanese Government with out-of-date statistics isn’t going to manage much. It’s possible (they somehow manage to keep a lot of digital things away from pirates) but I doubt they’ll do much.
Oh I don’t think the campaign is going to work, nor do I think it would be all that helpful if it did. Whether you like it or not, piracy spreads popularity.
However, I completely understand where they’re coming from. People working in the anime and manga business (like animators, not huge companies like Aniplex) usually have shit working conditions and shit pay. It makes perfect sense that the Japanese government and companies would want to protect their workers.
Already holding a candle for localizations, but there’s another problem: Potential repetition of Rapelay’s scandal D:
I don’t think that’ll be an issue, as long as they release the all-ages versions.
