HuniePop Dev Offers $1 Million for Right to Publish Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 in US

[Areloch]

Gotta ask, but what are you even referring to?

Are you referring to the one reply with the 'Anita eating popcorn' clip?
Or are you referring to the 'Chrono Triggered' image? Because a) that's not Anita, and b) the Triggered image macro is a running meme for a looooong time now.

Eh, I thought it was an old picture of Anita, because that meme comes up in virtually every discussion about her that I've seen online, for a long time as you state, so I assumed it had something to do with her. My mistake.

Yeah, it's a common one, but no, someone else entirely. Melody-something I think who made posts about how there are people with worst PTSD than soldiers, so soldiers need to accept that(I believe it was in relation to her commenting that she developed PTSD over being harassed online, so not many people were enthused by her saying she had it worse than veterans in war zones) and thus the satirical meme was born.

OT: All things being equal, it's hard to see it a bad thing if someone sees a product they want released, and are willing to put up money to make it happen. I think our diversity issues in gaming would be a lot fewer if there were more direct opportunities like this were people could just straight up go "here's my money, make this happen and screw what other people think".

As others have said, MORE options is the way to fix diversity issues, not fewer.

 

[Glaice]

Koei should tell these SJW idiots to fuck off (AKA IDGAFWYT) and release the game here anyways.

 

[NiPah]

Going off the VGChartz readings off of DOAX2 they stand a good chance to lose money off of this and using bullshit math I'll demonstrate my bullshit point. It sold 140,000 copies in North America. Lets be generous and say that they sold for profit to the publisher on an average price of $20 means that it made 2.8 million. Take into account that there are already DOA games that take up the market and that the people upset over this and say that they'll buy the game out of spite make up a rather few amount of people, most of whom won't stick to their guns because gamers suck at that and they'd probably be lucky to sell half of that. Lets be generous and say only a 20% dropoff so that drops to 2.24 million. Take away a million and it becomes 1.24 million. Thats just for the rights to publish the game, though. Now you have to pay for localization, advertising, distribution, taxation, etc, and they'd be lucky to break a million not counting possible royalties that Tecmo might ask for or even require as part of the deal. A million in investment for maybe a million in return investment is a decent investment but they could probably make more putting that million dollars plus all that extra if they invested it into another project. Its probably more of a publicity stunt for Huniepop and whatever next game that they're working on than a genuine desire to publish it, but it seems to be working. Unless they're just awful at business, in which case they should probably retreat on this to live and publish smut games another day.

You're making very good points on why this shouldn't be released but this is KT, the guys who released nobunaga's ambition sphere of influence after the previous title had a total of 80k sales since its release in 2006 worldwide, the guys who have had 3 vita releases in 2015 in the US with collector edition box sets. They know how to make collector editions work, they know how to make a profit off extremely niche games like the Artelier series, they could have made a profit off this. I mean hell dynasty warrior empires sold worse then DOAX2 but they still released the next game.

I agree that Huniepop are just doing this as a publicity stunt, but I disagree that KT couldn't turn a profit with a domestic release.

 

[Lightspeaker]

The funny thing is that it's been pretty much proven that the backlash is either not the sole reason or has nothing to do with the game not being released here,

Citation needed. As far as I've seen people are just sitting back and going "oh its OBVIOUS they're lying" and having absolutely nothing to back that up.

https://twitter.com/koeitecmoeurope/status/669507094584950784

Developer saying the CM who made the Facebook post blaming "SJWs" was wrong to blame anyone for the game not being localised (as they said back in August). I have also heard that the Facebook post and others by said CM have been deleted from the Facebook pages in question.

"We don't approve" =/= a retraction or condemnation of the statement in question. Merely that they regret it was put out.

 

[Superbeast]

"We don't approve" =/= a retraction or condemnation of the statement in question. Merely that they regret it was put out.

Deleting said posts, releasing that tweet, and the main company based in Japan producing a press-release are, in fact, a retraction. They said the statements shouldn't have been made and removed (i.e. retracted) them.

 

[pacouranga]

I hope they take HuniePop up on it. Welp, see ya.

 

[Atmos Duality]

Uh....why is it I get the feeling that in his rush to make an offer he's making an investment that most likely won't see a good return?

Even if it were a bad investment, a million bucks is pocket change at that scale of business.
Hell, 1 million for localization of a franchise people may have actually heard of is a steal.

I've seen far "niche-ier" titles do more with less (as in, "pre-order only" localization; EXTREMELY niche. Sub-100k copies), but that's beside the point.

Personally, I think KT is going ignoring the offer, not because it's bad business, but because it would make them look foolish. This all started because of politics and PR (redundant, really; since PR is a form of politics), and their corp-speak nebulous nothing statement is basically proof that they want the issue settled.

 

[C14N]

It really seems like they are courting the "anti-SJW" crowd and drumming up fake controversy.

That does seem to be exactly what's happening here. The lack of release was announced months ago with no fanfare but Play Asia wanted to sell a bunch of games. A pretty easy way to do that was to just come out and say that buying the game would totally make some SJWs really mad you guys so you should give them 70 bucks to pre-order it right now and stick it to those shitheads. It's kind of like those "support the pizza place that won't sell pizza for a gay wedding" or "pay me money to have God like you more" deals. It's a pretty easy way to rally some troops who normally wouldn't have thought twice about the game or even noticed that it wasn't getting a western release, but it's all been handled very childishly. It's basically this: http://i.imgur.com/OEFwLUp.png

 

[gyrobot_v1legacy]

Well, he's keen as mustard; I'll give him that. I'd be more in his corner if he hadn't pissed away the goodwill made by HuniePop by shitting the bed with the art style of its sequel. Still if he wants to have a crack at distributing it, I say let him.

Though if I were TK I might have gone halfway and said "No boxed release, but a subtitled version will be available on PSN for customers outside Asia". There, everyone wins a bit.

When Yakuza 5 was given a digital release people got mad. But as someone who was dying for something that wasnt panty quest in a deluge of boring panty quests that flooded the localization market while I grit my teeth at how non fanservice games never get localized I preordered it as soon as they announced it plus buying a ps3 just for it.

Still I dunno if I should laugh at the crowd that was catered to for almost five years despite all the flak reviewers gave their games.

 

[Schadrach]

That said, the idea is worth discussing. I don't really feel like a Progressive ideology nor the public good is very well served when the outcome is identical to a Puritanical one.

Oh, it serves a progressive ideology just fine, but only because in recent years progressive ideology has become rather shockingly illiberal. It's just more evidence behind horseshoe theory -- extremists tend to be more like extremists from other ideologies than like the moderates from their own.

I think it's very possible to serve shallow titillation and further the inclusivity of the medium writ large; you accomplish this by injecting more variety, not less.

The issue of course is that the same people who consider inclusivity/diversity to be the highest and most important good do not agree with that assessment -- they don't want to build their own things, they want to demand that things others build conform to their will, and they'll ruin you in the court of public opinion if you don't conform (if corporate, if individual they'll dox you and try to get you fired -- welcome to the internet).

An indie game developer I have never heard of until today has $1M to throw around?

They made a ton off HuniePop, surprised you hadn't heard of them given the amount of controversy sprung up around that one -- it can best be described as visual novel dating sim meets Candy Crush done better (they had to censor it for Steam, and released an official uncensored patch on their Steam discussion board). Their current project is a cam girl studio sim. Neither is exactly my cup of tea (especially the J-pop music they seem to love for some ear-bleedingly bizarre reason), but I'm not going to tell anyone not to carry them, enjoy them, or whatever.

Edit: Not as bad as James Deen, but I'll let you research THAT one on your own.

The thing I find the most interesting about the Stoya/James Deen thing is the difference in reaction between this allegation and the rape of Cytherea.

Of course, I suspect that Stoya's allegation is more useful to a political narrative. Stoya accused an ex boyfriend of raping her, who is conveniently a white relatively wealthy pretty-boy porn star well known in feminist circles, and I don't think there's any evidence aside from the allegation itself to back it, is there (did she even approach the authorities?)? So he's unlikely to be charged with anything, which serves as convenient validation of rape culture.

Cytherea's case is different though -- her rape happened as part of a home invasion, she actually went to the police in short order (you know, while there was actual physical evidence of what happened), and the perpetrators (three black guys, late teens) were rounded up and charged with a laundry list of crimes related to the incident, including sexual assault (for which they will be tried as adults). Her case is somewhat less useful from a political standpoint, to the point that the sites that talk about Stoya's allegation typically said not a word about Cytherea's case. It didn't really get talked about much outside of porn circles at all (it got talked about in GG circles too, but mostly because Mercedes Carerra talked about it), especially by the feminist sites that are all over Stoya's allegation.

So...if I do buy the game from that Play-Asia website, will it work on my PS4? There's not region lock or anything right?

I don't think there is a region lock on the PS4.

Xtreme is a more cut-and-dry case, but that then leads back to the silly argument that a game designed around fanservice is bad in any sense of the word.

Butbutbut, don't you know that inch of exposed pixel skin on a female character makes other elements of the game intrinsically worse? In all seriousness, I've never been able to figure that one out. I've always considered fan service to be generally neutral as far as effecting quality -- as in it doesn't make a title better, but it also doesn't actively harm it somehow simply by being there. Trying to push creators who want it there to remove it is an entirely different story though.

There used to be more room in the market, but they were literally shoved out of the pool by AAA practices, so the pool does seem to have a limit, and things will have to be swapped out for others unless the pool was expanded somehow, but there's an ongoing issue where any new space is immediately occupied by AAA after it becomes viable. It's not as cut and dried as it sounds. There is no motivation or room for diversity without another expansion or purge.

Confused. There's no limit on the games that can be developed, and in the modern mostly digital market there's not even really a "shelf space" issue either. It's even more absurd nowadays given that the breadth, recognition, and relative popularity of "indie" titles is the best it's been since before there was meaningfully a "AAA" industry.

Uh.. can't anyone who actually wants it just import it? Koei are probably getting all the sales they want/need via that route, so don't actually need to bring it over.

You are vastly overestimating the amount of people who import videogames.

You are vastly underestimating the percentage of DOA fans who just suddenly became aware of Play-asia, for the low, low cost of one tweet.

That last re-tweet...what the hell has Anita Sarkeesian got to do with this particular instance? It really seems like they are courting the "anti-SJW" crowd and drumming up fake controversy.

Because they are.

Play-asia definitely is. Even if you operate on the premise that the game isn't getting a western release because of not wanting to deal with SJWs (not entirely impossible). It only makes sense for Play-asia to do everything they can to draw attention to the game, because they expressly specialize in exporting Japanese games to Western audiences where the game either has no NA/EU release or a censored one. The DOAX3 situation plays exactly into their strengths, and once people are looking at your store front, you might get them to buy other things too.

Its probably more of a publicity stunt for Huniepop and whatever next game that they're working on than a genuine desire to publish it, but it seems to be working. Unless they're just awful at business, in which case they should probably retreat on this to live and publish smut games another day.

It almost certainly is, as in the end it gets them a bunch of advertising either way and if Tecmo Koei bites they certainly won't *lose* money from publishing it. All said, they're probably better off to sink that money into the cam girl sim they're working on instead (Hunie Cam Girl Studio, I think it's called?).

 

[Dosbilliam]

Edit: Not as bad as James Deen, but I'll let you research THAT one on your own.

The thing I find the most interesting about the Stoya/James Deen thing is the difference in reaction between this allegation and the rape of Cytherea.

...So he's unlikely to be charged with anything, which serves as convenient validation of rape culture.

Not going to say you're entirely wrong about that, since the cynic in me thinks that's part of it, but the context also matters a bit. With Cytherea, it was irrespective of her career choice; it could have happened to anyone, so it didn't get much press time (I don't think I'd actually heard about it before now) while with Deen, it was one sex worker raping another, so it's closer to the women's home, so to speak.

I will say this, though...out of everyone I've seen that could be considered anywhere near GG, you're the best person I've seen so far. Not a very high bar to clear, but you're leaping fairly far over it.