As we enter 2017, it seems that there's been a lot of stuff going on at Key in the last twelves months. Whether it's the confusing development of the Angel Beats series, the shifting in and out of Key's core staff, Jun Maeda's health, and the anticipation of Summer Pockets,
Good job on deleting some of my more stupid comments. Now, I just have to work on handling my breathing.
That was a great podcast. I learned a lot about Key that I legitimately knew little to none about before listening (be it Tonokawa quietly leaving the company, or clearing up some of the confusion behind Maeda’s status). I’d definitely like to see more of these (my only problem is I don’t often take the time to sit down and listen to these 
)
It’s really difficult to determine how well Key is doing as a company because, as you guys discussed, numbers are just that. Naturally, Key isn’t going to publically announce that their profit margin has gone down, so whether one subjectively believes their products haven’t been as good lately or not, we don’t know whether they’re doing what’s most important for the company in making money. That being said, I really wish there was some way to know whether Key was impressed with the performance of the Visual Novels they have released on steam. For instance, I don’t get the impression that Tomoyo After sold terribly well but did it sell to around the point they were expecting or did it underperform by their expectations? What about something like Harmonia? I doubt it will ever perform as well as Planetarian has on Steam but was Key still satisfied with its sales numbers? All we’re pretty certain about is that the Clannad Kickstarter performed extremely well. I’m a little upset that Steins;Gate’s steam release has more reviews on Steam than Clannad, even though the former already had formal releases overseas, though a good bit of that could be chalked up to a more reasonable price and Steins;Gate being relatively newer and having a plot that arguably reaches a bigger audience. Having such information would help determine whether they’ll push forward with the potentially lucrative release that Angel Beats would be. I also think that a lot is riding on Little Busters’ release. It’s not as well-known as Clannad, but it has an extremely strong reputation among Key fans, and I hope that notoriety would carry over to visual novel readers of all stripes.
I’m a bit worried about them pushing forward with more anime. Although there’s a lot of uncertainty about how well the most recent ones I’ve performed, new anime would constantly compete with not only the standard slice-of-life moe shows and light novel adaptations, but also visual novel developer Type-Moon’s massive franchise. Granted, the latter is part of a much different genre, but I believe they’ve achieved more success than Key as of late, so I think creating an audience for themselves is going to be an uphill battle. I’m also a bit concerned that Rewrite hasn’t received any home media licenses overseas also concerns me. When something like “When Supernatural Battles Become Commonplace” can get licensed and dubbed, but something like Rewrite doesn’t, I find it a bit worrisome.
As for true ends and meta-narratives, I’m impartial to them. I liked how they utilized it in Clannad and thought it served Little Busters well, but I can definitely see how something like that could be done wrong. I suppose it also unintentionally serves to downplay or shove to the side any existing character routes’ importance and that bugs me a little. On the flipside, I would definitely be content with a visual novel structure closer to Kanon, provided of course the stories are good.
Doesn’t seem like the MP3 is on the feed yet. Guess I’ll download the file itself.
