The real problem for me is not even the price itself but the fact that sekai project just annonced it out of nowhere in a twitter post a week before the game’s release when everything before that was pointing for the game to cost only 40€. I mean sekai project has released 3 major localized vn’s so far (grisaia,g senjou,clannad) and ALL 3 had at least 1 major problem with them (cropped cgs,18+ content and now the price).
This outcry against the 50€ price is not just cuz of the price itself but is the result of a series of bad decisions from sekai project that turned a lot of people against them.
its all worth it for HD Sunohara
@RandumPasserby @cjlim2007, please guys, paragraphs. Proper formatting makes your posts a lot less exhausting to read ^^;
@BerserkerMagi, I don’t really see how announcing the price is something that has earned Sekai Project hatred.
Because the people who are for it are less likely to speak up. I didn’t vote on that thing. I wouldn’t even know it existed if it wasn’t for people on Discord.
That’s a pretty bad assumption to make. That’s like assuming that people on /r/visualnovels are experienced with the medium.
Sekai are the ones doing Grisaia, so it’s likely that a lot of their followers have read less than 10 VNs.
Was that ever official though?
And how many of those were because of Sekai?
Then the people against them can just not buy the game. This is Steam, so people will never do that, but it’s perfectly fine if they do imo.
@cjlim2007 But it was just a twitter poll. Its something you click without thinking about it. No one sat there and contemplated: well, on one had thing game is huge and is good enough to be expensive but on the other hand thats more money than I can handle and the price is so bad… No. They asked “are you excited?” And no, people who had just found out that it was gonna be $50 were not excited.
Let me present myself as a personal example. I CLICKED NO. I think CLANNAD is worth $50, and I would buy it today if I hadnt already bought it on the Kickstarter. But at that moment I wasn’t “excited” that the price was $10 more than I was expecting, or that there were now flame wars going on because of it. Even though I’m HELLA excited for this game right now.
The poll means nothing. Only the sales will tell what people really think.
I’m going to assume 18+ content is referring to Grisaia in which case G-Senjou had it cut too and
- You can buy Grisaia’s 18+ on Denpasoft which you can’t with G-senjou
- We knew about Grisaia’s Steam version being all-ages before the Kickstarter launched which G-Senjou still has a “maybe”.
Friendly reminder that Sekai is not at fault for the pricing; Visual Arts can remove CLANNAD from the Steam store right this instant if Sekai doesn’t abide by what they say since they own CLANNAD entirely and Sekai is just a localisation team; they can only give pricing advice.
Don’t want to see the poor Sekai being blamed for something even they feel really reluctant about.
As a 15 year old 50 bucks is a lot of money
True, but you’d be surprised what you can buy if you save up for it. I was 13 when the Xbox 360 came out, and I bought it on launch day entirely with my own money. Which is currently blowing my mind that I’m that old… Anyways, that’s $500 (I was in Canada), and at 15 I bought the Halo 3 Legendary Edition for $130 (they weren’t checking ages for M rated games yet).
The point is, if something is important to you, you can save up for it and pay the high price. In all honesty, I’m glad that CLANNAD is more expensive, because that means that Key is getting more money with every sale, and also not undervaluing their work. Yes, the number of sales will probably be smaller, but just like with anime prices in Japan, they can probably make more money by selling a more expensive product to a fewer number of people.
At least, that’s the theory. I guess they’ll see how well it will work. Personally though, I think they made the right choice.
I guess I can see why some people would be put off by $50 but generally it seems very in line with what I was expecting. If people are only dabbling in VNs they would probably not be that well served starting with Clannad anyway.It is more the kind of game that is going to be appealing to people based on its reputation anyway. I think having a variety in price points based on length is also probably good for the genre as a whole, as you have to set cost standards somewhere.
He didn’t say he couldn’t save up for it, he said that it is a lot of money, and it is.
People can buy whatever they want within reason as long as they save up money, but that doesn’t mean we should all meekly accept what we find to be extortionate or unfair prices.
Just because you’re able to do something doesn’t mean that you should have to.
If I may weigh in, I find the $50 price tag to be reasonable for what the Visual Novel is offering in terms of content and overall enjoyability. I do, however, find it to be a punch in the gut for me as I didn’t support the Kickstarter, mainly due to the overall uncertain nature of Kickstarters and that I was unsure if I’d still be interested in VNs by now.
Turns out I’m still interested in them, and now I’ll have to eat the few extra bucks for waiting. Luckily there happens to be a sale going on, so I’m not going to miss out on that.
the sale doesn’t even cover $10 so I’m not even gonna buy for now.
Sorry, I wasn’t meaning to make it sound like I was insulting or calling @Purple out or anything. You’re both absolutely right, it is expensive. That comment just seemed like a good jumping off spot for the point I wanted to make, which is: If something is expensive, you have to decide how important it is to you.
For example, I would never buy the Legendary Edition of Halo 3 today, but the me back then was into Halo just as much as the me today is into anime, so I deemed it worth it at the time. Even though I’m now stuck with a small plastic MJOLNIR helmet that I no longer care for. But it was important to me then.
And that’s what VisualArt’s is counting on: enough people who think that CLANNAD is important enough to them to actually spend the price that VisualArt’s has decided it’s worth (which is absolutely their prerogative).
That’s the power of capitalism: you can vote with your wallet. If enough people don’t buy it, VisualArt’s will know that this pricing won’t fly here, and they can lower their prices for next time.
The price was lowered to the point where it only cost $42.49 Now let’s just enjoy CLANNAD and stop these pages that will being controversy and un-needed debates.
That doesn’t change the base price and the fact that even the sale price is still higher than $40
It’s still near $40. And be happy that they even decided to let us SAVE 15% from the original price.
Let me start off by saying that $50 seems perfectly reasonable to me, but this is coming from a super-fan of Clannad who threw his whole damned wallet at the Kickstarter.
I think a lot of the uproar over the price has to do with anchoring. There’s this concept in price theory that people don’t price based off of value, but based on other prices presented to them. If you offer someone two wines, at $10 and $25, most people will buy the $10 wine, but if you had in a third wine at $100, suddenly a lot more people will opt for the $25 wine, even though nothing about the wine itself has changed (this effect has been observed repeatedly in experiments).
The uproar in price has everything to do with anchoring, and the differences between the Japanese and the Western markets for visual novels. In Japan, Visual Novels are relatively mainstream, they’re a staple of the gaming market and companies like Visual Arts are considered Triple A developers in much the same way that we might consider EA or Activision. To the Japanese audience, the definitive edition of an iconic visual novel from a top tier developer fits in with other products at the price point of around $60.
The Western audience is a bit more complicated though. For us, there are at least three groups to consider, each with different anchors: importers, pirates, and newbies.
First, you have the importers, who have traditionally imported legitimate copies of Japanese games. This audience is anchored to the Japanese price + an import fee, and they’re used to an inferior product (fan translations). To this audience, any price around the Japanese price will seem pretty damned good. On a side note, I would venture to guess that Kazamatsuri has an unusually large number of importers, so our opinions are going to be biased towards paying $50 happily.
The second group to consider are the pirates. Importing is difficult, and ultimately unauthorized translations still break copyright, so even if you are applying a fan patch to the game you aren’t necessarily falling on the right side of the law. As a result, the Western visual novel community has grown out of piracy with its anchoring price of $0. That’s not to say that former pirates will never accept paying for a visual novel, since rampant piracy is often just a symptom of underserved markets, but it does mean that you have to really undercut your asking price to convert a pirate into a paying customer.
This brings us to the third group: newbies. Visual Novels have only recently started picking up steam outside of the US, but they are still considered a niche/indie product. The really successful visual novels have been shorter works with matching price points, and have been heavily influenced by the price anchoring of Steam and bundling services like Humble Bundle. This group has pretty low anchors, with games like NekoPara going on sale for $2.50, or bundles including games like Hatoful Boyfriend and World End Economica basically for free. One of the highest anchors for this group would be Grisaia, and it’s considered to be an unusually high-end product because of its price around $40.
There’s also something to be said for the market of anime fans, who are anchored to the price of streaming services like Crunchyroll, again making the game seem pretty expensive.
Now, to get back to the price of Clannad, specifically. Visual Arts kind of has their hands tied on this one, because their primary market is Japan. They can’t reasonably undercut the Japanese price by too much, because that’s really betraying their primary market. But they also can’t really expect to sell well in a Western market with such a different set of price anchors. Ultimately, what needs to happen is that more novels need to come out at around the same price point, so $50 starts feeling normal instead of expensive. Unfortunately, this is going to be bad for the first few novels trying to break into the market at a $50 price point, but I think Kickstarter can ease some of the pain for novels like Clannad with existing fanbases to exploit.
tl;dr - The price only seems high to people who aren’t used to Japanese VN prices.
You know I would have loved to be, if I was in a country that had broadband at the time. I always love critically analyzing people’s outrage.