It appears as if pirates have once again struck a blow against the industry, and we would not even have known if it wasn’t for the one man’s account of the vicious pirate attack. His name is John, but better known as Kouryuu on the interweb. Kouryuu works for Manga Gamer as a translator, translating Japanese visual novels into english. In a recent interview, he spoke about the business, and of course when you talk about business, the subjects of pirates is not far off. As you might of guessed, the business of selling visual novels is not quite booming here in America, but according to their business plans, it could be doing a lot better. He states that Kira Kira, and Higurashi are “Nowhere near as high as we wish they’d be. If our sales could reach those goals, it would be much easier for us to license some of the games that are out of our reach right now.” He goes on to state, "I also wish less people would pirate our games. For a multi-million-dollar console game developer, a few hundred or a thousand copies lost isn’t very significant, but for a small company like ours, every single loss hurts. As it stands, our best seller, Shuffle, has still only sold half the copies we’d like it to, and our next best sellers, Da Capo, Higurashi, and Kira Kira, have sold even less. People have asked us about whether or not we would ever publish hard copy print-runs, but the fact of the matter is that those are impossible if we can’t anticipate sales equating our current goal." But I wonder, if it’s really the pirates that are taking away all of their business, or maybe a combination of other things? For one each game is probably about $50 each, which is a bit pricy for a game that’s nothing more than a glorified book. Either way this interview is not all gloom and doom, he goes on and gives good advice to becoming a good translator, and what his daily life looks like. Check it out if you have ever wondered what it’s like to work as a translator.
(Read the rest of this entry) (Entry meta)
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Series:
Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni
Da Capo
