The problems that plague the eroge industry
It has become a popular topic recently to talk about the declining eroge industry and its impending doom apparently. This post is mostly translating what people have been saying, and this is also an extremely long post that you don’t want to read!
Zukeran no tera yaritai houdai writes that a large number of brands in the eroge industry have been restructuring their staff, and usually the writer is the first to get outsourced, there was even a case where the writer was retrenched even when he was the main writer for a game that was novelised and published in bookstores.
On the other hand, brands have been trying their best to get their hands on good artists, the reason being so that they want to make sure they can at least sell the game just on the art alone.
Part of the reason that all of this is happening is the growing doujin industry bubble.
It has been in recent years where it has become increasingly possible for somebody to live off just from selling doujin products alone as it seems to have become normal for megahit brands to be born in comiket. And in doujin, you get to avoid most of the troublesome stuff that comes with being a commercial entity.
As eroge becomes a less attractive industry to be going into, the number of new people in the talent pool available will also diminish, while veterans in the industry will move to the more established brands that continue to thrive. As a result, the smaller eroge brands will start to have trouble getting ahold of staff.
Noumu -gNorm- supports what Zukeran wrote by commenting that he has heard from people in the PC game sales industry that eroge brands have been unable to get proper staff recently which has made it hard to maintain a level of quality in their games.
While Zukeran wrote mostly about artists running into doujin, Noumu writes about the lack of writers in the eroge industry, as a lot of the good writers that once had the writing skills to be able to lead the entire eroge industry forward have moved on from eroge and started writing novels instead.
As a result, eroge brands are forced to look for freelance writers to write their stories which results in games that are sometimes good and sometimes bad.
Now, while everybody understands that the true hit sellers in the eroge industry involve great storywriting, but with the difficulty in getting good writers, brands try to get good artists instead so they can at the very least be able to sell the game just based on the good art. And for that, they put storywriting as a second priority, and in some cases even retrenching the writer and get freelance writers instead.
And while all that is happening, good writers that have gotten famous in the eroge industry leave the industry to write independently.
——–
Personally from the user side of things, I think many have probably already felt the lack of energy in the eroge industry over the past two years or so.
I don’t know how the current situation can be solved, but maybe if there are new charismatic games once again in the industry that inspire more talents to come back…
February 26th, 2008 at 8:04 am
I dunno, probably with a truck :V
February 26th, 2008 at 10:45 am
For me it felt like it died off 2003 and I see not really why the Doujinshi industry should be at fault, for us consumers it doesn’t truthfully mater for us the only thing that matters is to get some good games, whatever it’s comersial or doujinshi.
February 26th, 2008 at 2:51 pm
Is the eroge industry okay? Buster Wolf!
February 26th, 2008 at 5:23 pm
I don’t care about eroge, just let them all die off.
February 26th, 2008 at 5:51 pm
You seem to care enough to comment about them, Barachem.
On the positive side, the talent is being redirected to other mediums and not necessarily lost. It could just as easily come back if the market conditions change.
February 26th, 2008 at 6:29 pm
You all know what happens down the line, right?
Crappy eroge begats even crappier animu; reeking of T&A, blueballs, drooling and stinking otakutachi, panchira-giving merchandise, and concerts from voice actresses trying to make a buck.
I, myself, am more concerned about the ero-anime that will be made. It seems that more and more original doujinshi are being turned into ero-anime. (And, thanks to Pink Pineapple closing its doors to the market of uncensored anime, my blame goes to everyone who didn’t pay for the DVDs like I did.)
February 26th, 2008 at 10:18 pm
tl;dr
Where’s my To Heart 2 Another Days?
February 26th, 2008 at 10:36 pm
You know, dude, what attracted me to your blog in the first place was your comment that the eroge industry was dying, which I had read elsehwere. And, finally, you explain the reason why you thought so.
It’s like asking why it’s not easy being a write. I can tell you, straight up, that writer’s dont have it easy. The WGA strike wouldn’t happen, and writer would have more jobs. But, it seems very tempting to believe that ‘anybody’ could write. After all, it’s just a bunch of words, isn’t it ?
A person I trust remarked that, while he watch eroge-based anime (not the hentai) and so on, he won’t play eroge since the images are what he’s most interested in, which means he’d rather get it from the H… which he’d rather get from real porn…. which he’d rather get from realn sex with a partner (and that would lead to a long discussion in itself)
The eroge industry is an undesirable one, and it will be. Even mentioning it to others is undesirable, and I can bet that more people go for yaruge than story-driven galge.
If the eroge industry falls because it doesn’t prize its writer, then, while I don’t really wish to speak ill of it, it feels slightly deserved. Mind you, this is from my own bias as a writer, but it’s not as if eroge writers can go ons trike and demand equality the way the WGA did to movies and TV shows. And, artists can pproduce beautiful H, but, that’s like saying one can just got and download a 1MB H picture pack off the net for free.
It’s not just talent. The writers need to be recognised. I don’t how, but, somehow.
¬
But, even if that problem is rectified, the industry’s nature of being considered undesirable would signify it’s eventual decline. The most it can hope for is sustaining an unsteady but definitive niche market.
On the other hand, there have been moves to properly move galge off-shore. I heard Thailand was thinking of doing a visual novel first, and a galge doesn’t seem to far off. In the states, some 4channers have banded together to seriously make a galge (Katawa Shoujo) And, well, who knows what can come next.
I don’t know if you ever read your comments, but, we do share your concerns, though in other ways. Whille I believe ‘doomed’ is to strong a word, its not as if eroge can become bigger or anything.
February 27th, 2008 at 4:43 pm
@Charles:
I can also name other efforts to move galge offshore. Also in the States, a group has been making slow but steady progress on a dating sim which is highly reminiscent of the Tokimemo series. And the OELVN (original English-language visual novel) community is thriving, only other people don’t recognize it.
February 27th, 2008 at 5:16 pm
@Moonglight bomber
Would that be Oka Shira ? If it is, yeah, I’ve heard it. But, if it’s another, I’d also be interested.
There is a steady OELVN community, but, it’s even smaller than the visualnovel-reading community in Asia outside of Jpaan (it’s small, one way or the other).
(Thankfully, DO’s Kazoku Keikaku is coming over to the States…. but that’s not much. )
And back to the OELVN community, i find most of it using ren’oy, and most of that stuff is ‘visual novel’ per se. Zepy’s point here, though, is eroge, and the eroge community is a bit different from the OELVN community.
February 28th, 2008 at 12:15 am
As long as AliceSoft, Xuse, Giga, SkyFish, Yuzu-Soft, Marmalade, Lass, Lump of Sugar and Pallet stays alive, I’m happy.
February 29th, 2008 at 1:59 am
Well, sounds similar to the consolidation taking place in the pc gaming industry while the better companies move onto making games for consoles.
March 4th, 2008 at 9:51 am
wow so they finally realized tits & ass alone can’t make them money!