Thread: Brave Girl Ravens General Discussion (Chit Chat, Q&A, Events, etc.)

It's funny to see how some people complain about "Nutaku never learning on their mistakes", because the ones who never learn is players themselves - the ones who keep Nutaku afloat by giving them money, playing their games, even simply visiting their site. I mean, Nutaku already proven themselves being bad at management, support, basically everything (except from PR). And yet people continue throwing their money at them...

and... its gone.

Was there any compensation for other games? I kind of forgot about this.

Originally Posted by Koshkha

It's funny to see how some people complain about "Nutaku never learning on their mistakes", because the ones who never learn is players themselves - the ones who keep Nutaku afloat by giving them money, playing their games, even simply visiting their site. I mean, Nutaku already proven themselves being bad at management, support, basically everything (except from PR). And yet people continue throwing their money at them...

Well, I blame the devs. Although not as much as I blame the devs of Aigis. In this case, it kinda just seems like they got in over their heads...

I don't know why people hate nutaku so much. They just lend their servers to other devs/publishers for a part of their earnings. Nutaku can promote the game on social media, their front page, heck, even fake the ranking to attract more people, but after that it's all on the publishers hands to keep their players happy and interested.
To put thing in an example, imagine Nutaku as a shopping mall and the games as stores. If a stores offers shitty/overpriced products, it's not the mall's fault, it's the store's fault. But Nutaku it's not completely blameless.

If a publisher determines that a game it's not profitable anymore and decides to take it down, most of the time (most) it's not Nutaku's fault. Some of the games I played and why I think the closed:
- Aigis: According to the publishers, the game wasn't profitable anymore so they took it down. Nutaku negotiated with them because they knew Aigis was one of their most known games and it's closure would affect their reliability (and it did).
- X-overd: After a few months they had a low playerbase so they weren't getting the amount of money they were expecting.
- Sengoku Providence: The game was killed by the devs from the pre-release because of the greedy management that it had from beginning to end.
- Brave Girls Raven xR: No major updates for over a year, playerbase died out = no profit = closure. What many people wonder it's What took it so long to die?
- Idol Wars: The main mechanic of the game was the PVP. A broken matching system put a casual production against a full-of-whales production, which made PVP a one sided massacre. That scared away many players, and not having anyone to show off your superior wallet made the game boring even for whales.
- Osawari Island: The game was a time bomb since it's closure on DMM.
I don't know about the other games since I didn't play them.

Following your comparison with a shopping mall - a few questions:
- imagine yourself that an accident happened - the wall collapsed and somebody got hurt - who to blame, the shopkeeper (who rented that place) or a mall owner (who didn't cared about condition of that wall)?
- if shops are going bancrupt one-by-one because of the scarce profit and rare customers - who to blame, the shopkeeper (who rented that place) or a mall owner (who build his mall in some very inconvinient place)?

Originally Posted by Dargor

I don't know why people hate nutaku so much. They just lend their servers to other devs/publishers for a part of their earnings. Nutaku can promote the game on social media, their front page, heck, even fake the ranking to attract more people, but after that it's all on the publishers hands to keep their players happy and interested.
To put thing in an example, imagine Nutaku as a shopping mall and the games as stores. If a stores offers shitty/overpriced products, it's not the mall's fault, it's the store's fault. But Nutaku it's not completely blameless.

If a publisher determines that a game it's not profitable anymore and decides to take it down, most of the time (most) it's not Nutaku's fault. Some of the games I played and why I think the closed:
- Brave Girls Raven xR: No major updates for over a year, playerbase died out = no profit = closure. What many people wonder it's What took it so long to die?

If you think about why BGR didn't have any major updates for over a year, you can put a lot of the blame on Nutaku...

In the end, it boiled down to money for the following reasons:
1. Low player count - BGR wasn't the easiest game to get into. It had long story scenes (2minutes+ per scene, up to 15 minutes of just reading for the 6 scenes). There was a significant learning curve. Less players = less potential people who would pay.

2. Generous - It was easy picking up exclusive and platinum tickets. At one point, you could pick up a platinum ticket every 3 days just for logging in. Free tickets = no one makes in game purchases. Not only that, you would piss players off if you take them away.

3. Content - The next event in the game happened to involve loli versions of several key characters. Seeing how Nutaku had a loli-ban at the time, they weren't going to go ahead with that event. And by the time the loli-ban got lifted, Nutaku was already busy with other titles.

4. Resources - There were other DMM games running. Translators weren't an infinite resource. And if each new character means an extra half an hour of content for 2 new characters per event, it can be kind of costly if the translators take 10 times as long to convert the moonrunes to English.

So. In the end, because Nutaku barely made any money in the first 3 months, they just quit before they did anything. Hence a long period of nothing happening. But they had so much time before the license expired that they could have TRIED something.

1. If they took a slight loss and burst released a bunch of character content, the generous nature of the game would have solved itself as the players used whatever tickets they had in storage. Afterwards, just continue hosting exclusive characters and the players would have to fork over the dough. Long periods of time with nothing happening means players just build up wealth and you dig yourself further in a hole.

2. If the content was questionable, hop over it like they did in Aigis with Elyse.

3. If you're lacking resources, then those 5-6 DMM games that shut down should have had translators freed up. Considering every other game on the site doesn't need a translator since they're already in English, try using these guys more.

4. Even though the game had a learning curve, it had an all-world chat. Keep the content fresh and new faces would keep showing up and a veteran would definitely help them along.

The game was a good game. Many players think that it is well made. But no, the idea of putting more money into a game that hadn't left the ground the moment it was released was too unpalatable for Nutaku. So they just let it linger to earn passive income until the license ran out.

Basically, your Nutaku as a mall example is flawed. Aside from being told where they can operate and having customers provided by the malls, shops are expected to be completely self-sufficient.

That's not the case here. Certain shops need additional resources from Nutaku, so Nutaku ends up being more like a franchise (corporate actually but that's way too high-level a concept) headquarters who's responsible for dictating how a shop under it will run. It's not like the shop has its own translators and programmers, they were all provided by HQ. And HQ has those specialists working on other games too. If headquarters doesn't give a shop the resources it needs to survive and expand, then HQ is the one to blame when the shop is forced to shutter its doors because no one is going in. The only failing of the game was that it didn't attract a massive playerbase the instant it was released.

Originally Posted by MSA

If you think about why BGR didn't have any major updates for over a year, you can put a lot of the blame on Nutaku...

In the end, it boiled down to money for the following reasons:

You seem to have a different idea than I of what Nutaku can actually do. For example, does Nutaku actually provide the translators, or is it all on the devs? What I've seen suggests its the latter. You seem say Nutaku has a lot of control over the games - is there proof of this? It's not like they wanted Aigis (for example) to get taken down, but it seems it's not really up to them.

From what I heard, BGR had issues because the devs only had one translator working on things. Now, you could say, "Nutaku should lend a few people," but that would require them to work closely with the devs, and basically have creative control over the English version of a game, and I'm not sure if devs would be willing to give them that.

Nutaku is, as I understand it, a publisher. Their job is marketing. But in the case of BGR, they stopped getting content for them to market. And even if stores are expected to be self-sufficient, how many of them are expected to open a product's packaging and modify the contents?

Originally Posted by MalusCorvus

You seem to have a different idea than I of what Nutaku can actually do. For example, does Nutaku actually provide the translators, or is it all on the devs? What I've seen suggests its the latter. You seem say Nutaku has a lot of control over the games - is there proof of this? It's not like they wanted Aigis (for example) to get taken down, but it seems it's not really up to them.

From what I heard, BGR had issues because the devs only had one translator working on things. Now, you could say, "Nutaku should lend a few people," but that would require them to work closely with the devs, and basically have creative control over the English version of a game, and I'm not sure if devs would be willing to give them that.

Nutaku is, as I understand it, a publisher. Their job is marketing. But in the case of BGR, they stopped getting content for them to market. And even if stores are expected to be self-sufficient, how many of them are expected to open a product's packaging and modify the contents?

All you need to do is to consider the censored scenes. You know, the loli's with the massive racks. That was done by someone in-house in Nutaku. It seems reasonable that the devs were consulted for the complicated stuff like the marriage system, but they were happy to take a step back and let Nutaku handle the localization of the game.

I mean, consider Kamihime's generosity where the Devs have an active hand in the game, and compare it to the skinflint response that Nutaku has with the other DMM titles. Which do you think is the one where Nutaku needs to pony up their own dough?

I can't profess to having the agreements on hand. But you can use logic to consider the history. First of all, Nutaku was founded in 2015. A Canadian company. Not Japanese. Now consider that Nutaku SOMEHOW managed to enter an agreement with DMM and now has the right to host several of DMM's top titles. Either some amazing negotiating had taken place, or a no-name company with a bit of money to burn offered something to those devs. Mainly, they would provide help in bringing those games over to the West. What did that help normally entail? They probably offered to take care of the translation in addition to navigating the legal quagmire and offering the usual hosting service. After all, translation is not cheap. Most Japanese companies don't bring their games to the West BECAUSE it's not worth the cost, not because they're not interested.

But if you keep a few on staff, and keep the work flowing to them, you can basically consolidate the cost. Not only that, Nutaku speaks the language, knows the laws, and they're not a US company (which have a reputation of being pricey). So all Nutaku has to do is claim that they can localize a game for cheap, point to the other game developers that have signed on, have the developers pledge the very basics of tech support. With that, the developers will have the impression that they can sit back and relax and their game will appear in the wider world while money will flow to their pockets. Nutaku is the one who will take care of the heavy lifting.

Here's the rub. Nutaku is a new publisher. It's not known as a translating company, it doesn't have a long list of successful titles. The Canadian company is basically like a Chinese contractor who placed the lowest bid. Trusting in it to make your game successful is basically taking a leap of faith.

...Yeah, the long list of shuttered games shows that the dev's trust was misplaced. Nutaku will claim that it was too soon, and that the Western world was just starting to get used to the idea of anime in games. But most of us know that the publisher's questionable quality, tight purse, and overwhelming greed isn't helping matters at all.

@ MSA

Dude..... I haven't seen this level of denial in a long while..... Yes, Nutaku could have done things differently, but I don't think that would have changed much at the end of the day. And I'm pretty sure they don't have the level of influence that you think they do.

While I don't disagree that Nutaku and developers have their faults, passing all the blame to everyone but the consumer is kind of ignorant. The stuff you mentioned is just trivial stuff that would have been worked out given enough time. All these companies are in to make money. People just didn't spend enough money, which is fine because that is just the way the market works.

It really dosen't have to be more complicated than that.