26 results for "d58c5f4c7cfe3b1fdf527c860fb6b5d0"
>>725017417
The problem with Steam being a monopoly is not really the price fixing or the cuts they take (30% is industry standard, like it or not. Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft all take the same cut), it's their opaque content restrictions effectively forbidding certain types of games, particularly Japanese ones, from being sold there, which due to Steam's monopoly making other storefronts irrelevant and a dead-end for sales, effectively bars these games from the market and forces them to self-censor if they are made at all.
>>724109443
I don't give a fuck about your western goyslop. The Japs would probably just import it anyway if they really cared. Unlike our shit which every single significant actor does everything they humanly can to make sure they can't release unneutered if at all.
>>723522120
Every platform is implementing the same policies against the same content at the same time, all designed to inhibit or discourage its production. Companies that specialized in said content are struggling or going out of business. Series that were mainstays of Japanese otaku gaming in the 10s like Senran Kagura and Gal*Gun are now virtually impossible to produce today because of the conditions imposed by increasing industry regulation. Publishers are not shy about telling you this, either. If this isn't a coordinated attempt at deplatorming and eradicating a subculture, I don't know what is.
>>723522192
>previous right-wing cancel culture
What cancel culture? Games in the 00s and early 10s just followed the ESRB/PEGI/CERO guidelines and were not restricted otherwise, and outside of a few instances, platforms didn't really have these rigorous in-house guidelines targeting content they consider "contentious"; this all only really started becoming a problem in the late 10s, and that dovetailed nicely with the ascendance of the female gaze in a male hobby.
>>723034516
The games are already effectively soft-banned across the industry. We lost Senran Kagura, Gal*Gun, Omega Labyrinth, Bullet Girls and Genkai Tokki to Sony alone. How much more do you fucking want? Devs aren't going to do these games if you throw up every barrier imaginable. They were never targeted at normalfags to begin with, anyway. This just sounds like the "zoning" argument that the fucking feminist Bocchi screenwriter put forth.
>>723019195
>>723019569
Image attached to this current post is devs talking about being forced to comply with safe horny. Specifically, Steam's safe horny restrictions.
Right as niche devs finally start dropping Playstation (Aquaplus skipped PS with ToHeart, Inti is skipping PS with Majogami) and praising Nintendo for being a safe space for them, Nintendo pulls the knife

These JP devs were always correct to be weary of Nintendo. Shadiest company in the industry.
>>721070021
>Inti Creates also run into this problem but they didn't really give a fuck
They do give a fuck, though, it's the reason why they haven't made a Gal*Gun 3 and are stuck with making Castlevania wannabe spinoffs. They even explicitly cite platform issues and the desire to reach as many people as possible on every platform, something no longer possible with Gal*Gun. All their major releases since the turn of the decade have been multiplat, they didn't even drop Xbox after the Gal*Gun Returns fiasco and are one of the few weeb devs still consistently releasing games there. Multiplat is firmly established as the new industry meta, and almost no one wants to give up on a potentially lucrative platform even if it means they must develop with the lowest common denominator in mind. The only thing that can potentially stop this is the audience being vocal and insistent on the content that gets censored, but only low-budget porn games have a small enough audience to where that's viable
>>719847865
>yet it's also their own fault for continuing to release on cucked platforms like PS4 and Switch which notoriously crackdown on even the slightest hint of fanservice in games these days.
And what does that leave? Microsoft/Xbox who are even more cucked and banned Gal*Gun Returns and fucking Postal Redux, Steam who banned a censored version of Tokyo Clanpool, GOG who demanded the same censorship of Tokyo Clanpool as Nintendo did, DLSite who are buckbroken by payment processors, and then the rest of the backwater PC storefronts with a few thousand users max. You underestimate just how dire the situation is for anime moege and eromoe otaku games.
>>719065120
Yep, pretty much. We've basically gone back two decades with western releases of Japanese games, and the worst part is that back then, it was mostly just because they didn't see the need and mainly made these games for the domestic market. Today, the domestic market is nowhere near as vital as it was back then, so companies are increasingly reliant on western releases, only to be met now with barrier after barrier to release. Unless something is done about these companies' restrictive, unfair policies, you're going to see a lot of these companies either sanitize themselves into unrecognizability or just die off, sometimes both. Weeb/otaku media is being deliberately attacked on almost every front.
>>718892475
The SnoyValTendo anti-anime fanservice alliance.
>>718887443
Because the less platforms that will host them, the less likely they are to be made and released. This is directly cited by Inti Creates as the reason why Gal*Gun hasn't had a new game in seven years, by the way.
>>513811514
>Twitter is not the law
Funny, because major companies and platforms are treating it like it is.
>>718304581
>>718043115
It is the only one that matters and the only one that has sales potential comparable to consoles. All other storefronts combined have less than 10% of Steam's marketshare. Anything that can't release on Steam is made 90% less financially viable just by the fact it's not on Steam. How many devs who have had their games banned from Steam need to come out and tell you just how damaging it was to their prospects before you'll stop burying your head in the sand and acknowledge Steam's monopoly and the impact it's had? Even the Japanese alternatives like DLSite just get kneecapped by the plastic card companies doing "muh brand" anyway.
I want no-gritted-teeth apology letters to every niche Japanese dev right now.
Instead they'll tell you "the right" did this to them.
>>717928692
Agreed, and I'll add that it should be extended to video game storefronts as well (at least the four major ones) to make them cease this ridiculous wave of censorship against Japanese games both PG and H. Why does EVERY single storefront suddenly refuse Japanese PG fanservice games that were normal a decade ago no matter what they do?
>>717549743
They unfortunately don't really have any alternatives, especially for selling to the west. DLSite is also cucked, albeit in a different way, DMM does not allow purchases outside of Japan, Epic and GOG are also cucked, and JAST, Kagura Games and MangaGamer are too small. The latter four are also insistent on being DRM-free, which is a turn-off for Jap publishers especially as they view it as equivalent to piracy. There is growing awareness of how shit Steam is for anime bishoujo games over there, but their mindset is that it's just something they have to suck up and deal with if they want to sell to gaijins.
>>715943026
>I mostly play Japanese games any way
And that's exactly what's been getting disproportionately censored since 2018 at the latest. Dumbass. The people behind this are the same ones that think 90% of anime girls are "underage-coded".
>>715790990
It shows that just because a game isn't explicitly pornographic doesn't mean it's safe. They've shown they're willing to go after any Japanese game with even mild erotic elements. It's exterminating what's left of the Japanese moe otaku game market after Sony already dealt it a crippling blow.
>>714961135
If anything, like with Tokyo Clanpool, it'll get fucked by both of them. This is an actual otakucore game that was in development before the great Sonypocalypse, and every mainstream platform is making their hostility to Vita-style otaku games clear. None of them have gotten any better, they've only gotten worse, and more and more storefronts are shutting themselves off to these games, GOG being the most recent. Unless there's a major movement to use any means necessary undo these platforms' policies, these games will die and never come back.
>>714633876
I don't wanna hear anyone talk to me about "marginalized developers" until they acknowledge the shit Japanese otaku moege devs are forced to go through when they try to release games now.
>>714466297
Where are you getting the idea that gaming is "healing"? That plastic overproduced gook game Stellar Blade that's firmly in the confines of safe horny and which was censored on release anyway? Meanwhile here's Inti Creates saying they have no platform to release Gal*Gun on any more because all of them have the same policies against Japanese-style games. Bonus Aquaplus saying largely the same thing. Both of them know all too well the pain of having the rug pulled on them.
>>714327296
>Except Valve doesn't have a monopoly
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
Antitrust legislation needs to be updated to account for this. Valve's network effect has made it all but impossible for other storefronts to compete with them, and as a result anything that can't release on Steam is effectively doomed to die in darkness even if it releases somewhere else.
>>714201819
After having the rug pulled on them three times now, devs are never going to be able to trust that they won't get screwed again unless they have actual leverage. Both Nintendo and Valve explicitly stated they wouldn't indulge this behavior and yet here we are. The words of corporate heads are meaningless.
Niche Japanese game studios are being choked out of existence by platform holders
There is now a permanent chilling effect on Japanese studios that make games like these. Even IF platform holders eased up a little bit, how are they even supposed to go back to making the games they used to?
It needs to be illegal to reject a release to games that have all been approved by ratings boards.
>>714046282
Successfully enacted a permanent chilling effect on Japanese studios, even if Mary died tomorrow companies will fear ever developing what they used to make out of caution that this will all happen again.