Anonymous asked:

What do you think of Taimanin RPG Extasy shutting down?

Anonymous asked:

Any thoughts on the English/Global version of RPGX shutting down not even a year after release? In your opinion is eroge based gacha doomed to fail in the western market?

I'm pretty astounded that they couldn't even make it last a year. I don't think the market or product category are the problem. Nutaku has enough stupid games that seem to do well enough, and TABA lasted for the entire run with a small fraction of the original version's playerbase. (Which was why you could actually compete for event rewards in it, whereas in the original it wasn't even worth trying.)

I think the reason for this is simply that it was handled atrociously. Everybody knows about the Taima crystal debt situation, which is unbelievably bad PR for a game that's only just come out. It probably scared away a lot of the whales. But also, they decided to be ambitious and make changes to the game which were completely unnecessary. The changes they made to TABA typically fell into either the category of pointless or beneficial (adding music, for instance). Global RPGX changed major aspects for the sake of changing them, and it ended up causing their developers a lot of unnecessary work. You already have a primary dev team who have made the game, evolved the game, fixed the bugs, balanced the stats and gem costs, etc. Other people have done the work for you, and you decide to completely change a lot of things, which inherently forces you to do all that stuff from scratch. That means you can't just hire a skeleton maintenance team, a small translation group and a community relations manager. You have to pay and retain people to actively adapt the game to your version, and spend time considering how things will be balanced, and how to incorporate new features from the original that are in conflict with yours. Not to mention the bugs you will inevitably introduce.

Anonymous asked:

The global version of RPGX has recently been announced to shut down. Does this open up room for you potentially translating some of its scenes now? https://twitter.com/karoshimyriad/status/1785145366566023336

Anonymous asked:

Hay rattan man did you hear about rpgx shutting down on aug 1 this year? What do you think about this and if i can ask would you be willing to translate more scenes for the game?

Well...... I did once say I intended to translate all the Taimanin games...... *Monkey's paw curls a finger*

The only reason that I haven't done more scenes is because I knew the game would inevitably get an official translation. I didn't see it lasting as long as the original, but I thought for sure it would go at least two or three years. The amount of work this would take is genuinely insurmountable for me. I did a quick calculation based on the most recent viewer patch, and if every single event cycle contains as many lines, then I couldn't even keep pace with the game, let alone work at catching up. Also, thanks to problems with my business, I'm currently having to do the work of 1½ people, and it's going to get worse in the summer, just like it did last year. I might have long stretches where I can't work on anything at all.

So, my current stance on the matter is this: I will do more scenes, but I don't expect to do them all. I'm also not sure what to do about story, but I'm thinking that I would have to focus on the main chapters and skip over events, with very few exceptions. I'm considering several different courses of action, from only doing popular scenes occasionally (since I still have at least one game to get through in the meantime), to doing one scene a month, to continuing to do VNs, and doing huge blocks of RPGX content in between them. I can't make any promises of any kind, because life keeps conspiring to take all my time away as it is. If anyone has any better ideas, feedback would be appreciated, because I'm at a loss as to how to handle this situation.

Comments

  1. I personally think you should simply just pick up where RPGX Global left off. Translating main story chapters and events when you got time/motivation in chronological order. Its probably safe to say we will never see an English version return for this game, so that seems to be the best cause of action if we want the rest of RPGX properly translated, even if it will take years T_T.

    They notified us well in advance and afaik, they will keep updating the game until August with whatever events and such they had in the pipeline so there is plenty of time before you'd have to work on it.

    I know this might have some people light their torches and fetch their pitchforks but maybe you would consider MTL assisted translation for faster results? My impression is that RPGX Global used proofread MTL, and while it definitely wasn't perfect, it read surprisingly well. Much better than the TABA translations that seemed to be basically pure google translate. In my experience, AI MTL translation has come such a long way now and with some proofreading, you get a translation that's nearly indistinguishable from a manual translation.

    Just my 2 cents. Ultimately, you should do whatever you feel most comfortable with and what you feel like :-)

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    1. The problem with machine translation is that it still gets things horribly wrong, but it’s good at covering its tracks. It used to be that it would try to translate the sentences 1:1, with the obvious result that it made mistakes and sounded unnatural. Ever since AI started to become a thing, it seems to cross-reference the results with some database of English sentences and change them to sound better. I’ve been doing occasional tests for years, and at one point, I started seeing Bing actually change its output a split second after its initial one. Even now, I have a whole folder of screenshots of DeepL getting things wrong, or doing things arbitrarily. My personal favourite is the one where I put just a single word into it, and it would output a completely different translation depending on how many exclamation points I used.
      I have considered this, but I think I would end up having to go through just as much effort simply to check that the translation was correct. It might save a little bit of time with regards to phrasing, but it might also cause me to miss some important mistakes or nuances.

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  2. Whoa whoa whoa, you don’t need to do the rpgx pure story scenes, thats already been translated in the taimanin general thread in /h/. Only the H scenes themselves are worth doing. Personally I’d want the alter kimono version of fuuma aki (tentacle scene).

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    1. Can you link me to them? The only translations I’m aware of are summaries from someone on Discord, and I don’t know how detailed they are. I just know that they’re not viewer-compatible.
      The story actually is important, for a number of reasons. Firstly, there are people who want to find out what happens. I’ve already seen posts lamenting the fact that they’ll never find out how it ends. (Which is a bit naive, since it will probably just make something up and stop, like TABA did.) Secondly, a number of the scenes that people really want to see are from the future universe. You can get the gist of the situation (alternate timeline, brain flayers, etc.) pretty easily, but it’s a jarring situation for the uninitiated.
      And that leads to the final point, which is that context matters. One of the things that I really like about RPGX is that they constantly reinforce the presence of minor characters, to make them seem like a huge expanded cast. I lost interest in the OC Taimanin immediately in TABA, because the first card I pulled came with no backstory, no context and no reason to care. You want to see Maika in action so that you can waifu her, or Momoka being a vapid retard so that you can say “God I want to rape that little shit”. I would say that, crap as it may be, the story is more fundamentally important than the scenes.

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    2. Yeah he is only referring to the summaries found on 4chan and this doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1koBwcMlYnY5Z5gezuY9tbnBLWxQ9jByLbcO2A_ZGDwA/edit#heading=h.olxvgx5qvsla

      Afaik, we don't have integrated translation of the main story aside from what was released in Global but the main story translations from the doc seem to be written in a way that should make it easy to inject into the viewer? Either way, I have not read it and don't plan to. I want to read it in-game/viewer like they were supposed to be read.

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    3. Just realized main-story was only translated word for word up to ch. 6. The rest are summaries -.-

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