Argh, I didn't want to think about this game going away, but I forced myself to face it and now have every girl at UR and 200+ affection. Now to carve a chunk of time to read all their stories.
Argh, I didn't want to think about this game going away, but I forced myself to face it and now have every girl at UR and 200+ affection. Now to carve a chunk of time to read all their stories.
Sacred Sword Princesses invite code for server 2: Ruu0006963
Oh well, more tears in the ocean. Just another reminder that any company that kills games is not a company you want to give money to.
I think I've spent more time on this in the past few days that I have in the past year. As it turns out... I really like this game. I mean, I did before, too - there's a lot of work put into the art, into the story, into the characters. It's just... it's on Unity. There are a finite number of computers+browsers I have access to that can actually run it well. That, and I don't care for the combat much. Much of the player input is in the preparation and the battles themselves are rather simplistic.
In the meantime, I'm doing much as DrunkMonkGar did, and am leveling up, ranking up, and feeling up (pun intended) all the girls. I'm also recording random things like backgrounds, voices (for now just Francette, the girl I put a ring on, I plan to do Elena and Adelite next), music... just, everything I might possibly want to look on in the future.
Yeah, I don't take games being taken down very well. Things like this are why I have a motto of, "If it's on the internet and you like it, save everything." Happens a lot on Nutaku, I notice, and it seems the reasons are similar to why Millennium War Aigis got taken down - the devs did things too conservatively and didn't devote the proper resources to the English version (being hesitant to take risks is, so I hear, a common thing with Japanese corporations). Thus, there wasn't enough interest.
Last edited by MalusCorvus; 07-28-2018 at 06:39 PM.
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.
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)?
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.
Last edited by MSA; 08-05-2018 at 01:52 PM.