Licensed by JAST USA for North America. [animenewsnetwork][uk-anime.net]
Took them long enough. This should have been done that right when the anime was hot. Too bad 5pb apparently doesn’t think that way.
And this is just a trivial point but Siliconera writes: “Steins;Gate Is Coming To The West”…… no, steins;gate is already made it to the west. The full game is already translated. They are now doing an upgraded version by the same people. I have no idea why siliconera has it as policy to make no mention of fan translations, no matter what. Not even Rewrite. They didn’t used to be like that back in 2010.
People keep mentioning fuwanovel nowadays on siliconera. A week ago I linked a post from your blog (If My Heart Had Wings) on that website for discussion purposes, and it got taken down.
I understand that fan translation is hurting the niche VN industry, but they’re not being realistic with sales and expectation in proportion to censored content and alienate fans not listening to feedback.
Then again, Japanese companies don’t make it easy for official translators to release on Steam, ie in that siliconera post in the comments section. That really cuts out potential sales. I wonder why they’d do something like that…
Well it is a hard case to argue that fan translations compete against the VN industry let alone compete against other localizers. most of the time they’re not even competing. it is possible that a tiny number of fan TL competes against commercial localizers. but they are the minority.
and the competition is mild, because it is not a zero sum game anyway as saya no uta has shown (massive mainstream press coverage). only the most conceited people within the japanese publishing chain (and some diehard fans) thinks it is devastating competition. fan translation i think, is a net positive for the VN industry.
also notice i dont use loaded language like the word “hurt”, because it falsely describes exactly what is happening. theyre dishonest words, but not saying u are dishonest! im saying the words we are taught to use are dishonest.
also i actually think siliconera does delete all mentions of fan translations. someone else told me earlier that they had theirs deleted as well. (even though it was approved initially)
I keep wondering if they’d have better luck by bringing these VNs to mobile devices first rather than PCs. Steins;Gate, in Japanese, is already on the App Store, as is Chaos;Head and a number of other top titles. So the code is there; they just need an official English patch (and because the mobile stores are so locked down, there’s no way for “unofficial” English patches to work except through jailbreak channels)
There’s clearly a paying audience for mobile apps – 500 million people have iTunes accounts according to Apple – and it’s a lot easier to reach them through the App Store than through Mangagamer and JAST’s channels: people who are plugged into anime fandom (and a fairly small corner of it, at that). Steins;Gate being a “featured app” on the App Store for just a day would reach more people than have ever seen JAST’s banner ads on ANN or their print ads in Otaku USA.
And, frankly, I’d much rather play Steins;Gate on a mobile device when I’ve got a few minutes here or there, rather than have to park my ass at the computer when the mood strikes.
I actually think phones and tablets are a great home for VNs. The problem comes at the price point. I feel most people won’t drop the $20+ dollars companies seem to expect from these sorts of games. Most of the time people won’t blow even $5 on a single app.
I just hope they dont think the same…
I would rather do a few hours of sitting and reading a VN than some minutes here and there on a small mobile screen ^_^
Cool. Here’s hoping they don’t take two years like they did with Saya no Uta.
I’ll be surprised if this title is out within a year.
(Me at the age of 27): “Don’t be ridiculous.”
(Me at the age of 62): “Well whippersnapper, you win this round…”
I wonder how they are going to translate all the 2chan/2ch memes Steins;Gate has.
Now to wait another 2 years or so until JAST actually releases the damn thing.
[…] up via Sakamoto_Neko. Hoping someone can port the existing translation to Android. There is an official translation coming via JAST USA if you didn’t […]