Anonymous asked:

As funny as the idea of the 'porn vn tl community' is-- you are (at least for me) the oldest running tl that I am aware of. Is there anything that comes to mind as 'large happenings' within the community? As translations become more and more cost-effective for companies, we will start to see the end of fan translations. It almost feels sad that this internet (degen) chapter will finally collapse and disappear.

I don't think there even is a community. It was a mostly dead scene when I got there, apart from a small number of people who have since retired or turned professional. The only one I can think of who's still around is Loe Quality Translations, and he almost bleeds more into the general VN translation scene.

The massive increase in localization definitely contributes to a decline in any kind of fan efforts, in the same way that it did with anime fansubs. I've complained ad nauseam about how everything seems to be in danger of getting picked up now. Machine translations are also starting to eat away at it. You may have noticed a few people who have made it their business to produce nonstop MTL patches as if they were real translations. For one of them, I counted twelve releases in a single month, which means there's about a 0% chance that any actual work is being put in.

Both of these things create a "why bother" mentality: Why bother putting the effort in, if there's going to be an official localization that everyone gravitates toward instead? Why bother, if a MTL patch is broadly close enough, and everyone seems content with it? When they're up against forces they simply can't compete with, more and more people will slowly give up, until eventually the scene is dead. That said, it's way worse for anime: you used to get all sorts of choice when it came to fansubs, and now every "group" is just some guy trying to pass off the same subtitles as their own. That's far more of a tragedy than a dead eroge translation scene, because you actually lose something, rather than just get a crappy replacement.