Final Review of 2013

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Okay, so we know a lot of you have been enjoying the personal looks back from various members of our staff, but I bet a lot of you are still wondering how we’ve done in terms of business during 2013. So, let’s get started with a review of what’s happened and changed in the last year!

One of the biggest highlights and marks of our growth during 2013 was probably the fact that we were able to announce over three different new partners as well as over 16 new titles acquired for release here to the western audience, and a great deal of those are already out if not rapidly nearing completion. We’ve been expanding and growing at an incredible speed here in the past year, and there have been a few road-bumps as we pick up speed and start stretching our wings. As our staff already mentioned in one of our previous looks back, as of this year, we at MangaGamer can now officially say that we are the localization company which has single-handedly put the most visual novels and eroge titles on the Western market for English-speaking fans of all varieties and walks of life to enjoy! So let’s take a look at our top sellers for 2013!

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  1. EROGE! ~Sex and Games Makes Sexy Games~
  2. Demon Master Chris
  3. Harukoi Otome ~Greetings from the Maidens’ Garden~
  4. Cum on! Bukkake Ranch!
  5. Tick! Tack!
  6. SSSS: Super Secret Sexy Spy
  7. Throb! The Greatest Inventions of the Sexy Era!
  8. Kara no Shojo
  9. Koihime Musou
  10. Touma Kojirou’s Detective File -Murder at the Opera House

So, in short, the porn has been doing quite strongly this year, which gives us a lot of hope for the success of Lilith’s line of games as they start pouring out in 2014, but the more story-centric ones are still trying to put up a fight. We’ve added a new title to our catalog nearly every month since the new website went up in April, and each and every one of them is doing well. Eroge‘s success has definitely proven that longer, more involved nukige have a chance of succeeding as a full-priced title, so we’re very hopeful about our upcoming releases of Ultimate Boob Wars and the extra-long Imouto ParadiseWe also have a few other exciting pieces along this vein to announce already, but we’ll hint at those later in our look forward.

What about our hard-copy sales though?

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  1. Boob Wars
  2. Otoboku
  3. Shuffle
  4. Go Go Nippon
  5. DEARDROPS
  6. Harem Party
  7. We Love Master
  8. Higurashi When They Cry
  9. Kara no Shojo
  10. Da Capo 2

Boob Wars has undeniably become one of our top sellers with over 1500 hard copies sold this year on top of it’s already similarly large digital sales, so we’re quite excited to see how well Ultimate Boob Wars fares with the longer content and higher price. It’s good to see that at least in hard copy form our story games are all running strongly against some of our other options. Though we didn’t get to add too many titles to our hard copy selection this year between all the road bumps involved in getting our new hard-copy section of the website up and running, we’re very happy to add Kara no Shojo to that list, and we hope everyone here who hasn’t tried it takes this chance to pick up the Limited Edition before it’s gone. The soundtrack for the game is beautiful, and you wouldn’t want to miss it. We’ll be talking about new additions to our hard copy catalog later, but we’re glad that everything is now up and running. We’re still adjusting to taking orders and handling this ourselves to some extent, so be sure to share your feed-back with us so we can help improve our service.

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Earlier we mentioned some road-bumps as our expansion has really been picking up speed, and they’ve been felt all around. With the retirement of slaonereinja from our editing department and his replacement by ochareinja with Tim assisting on more occasional editing, our entire team has been forced to take note of several translation standards we’d been previously taking for granted as known by everyone. This specific bump has been even more pronounced by the fact that we’ve been adding many new translators to the team of contractors helping us bring these wonderful games to everyone. Hopefully our old-time testers are pulling through and none of you reading this will be able to notice this bump at all. If so, make sure to give them another pat on the back in addition to ours. That being said though, this has helped us create a better defined list of standards, that will hopefully help our broad team produce more unified results for your reading pleasure.

Our convention attendance this year also saw some expansion, and we’re very pleased with all of the results thus far. Though we won’t be expanding our attendance in 2014, we do plan to keep attending all the conventions you’ve seen us at this year.

With all this rapid expansion, things here at MangaGamer have been getting very busy on every end, but our strive to bring out lots of good games with quality translations remains the same, and we’re excited and hopeful that our fanbase will continue growing along with us!

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42 Comments

  1. lol boob wars…

  2. “This specific bump has been even more pronounced by the fact that we’ve been adding many new translators to the team of contractors helping us bring these wonderful games to everyone. Hopefully our old-time testers are pulling through and none of you reading this will be able to notice this bump at all.”

    Bump? What bump? Like translation wise or editing differently?

  3. I’m glad your finding success, sad to see that EF Latter Tale didn’t make top 10 though. The games that seem to make money all seem to be the ones I don’t have an interest in, hopefully it remains viable to continue offering variety and games similar to EF series going forward.

  4. Figured Eroge! and Demon Master Chris would be up there. Got both 😀 hooray for Mangagamer I’m sure 2014 will be good for you too.

  5. I still need to finish the 1st ef before I can buy the second, but yeah, bummed that the story heavy/eroge light stuff I love hasn’t been selling as well as the straight up porn.

    Particularly bummed not to see Kara no Shoujo higher, my favorite VN next to Clannad.

    I’ll do my part in 2014 to see the story driven stuff do better!

    • Kara no Shoujo was a 2011 release though so as far as the digital sales charts go I’d think that’s actually a decent showing for 2013, even if it got a fair bump from the voice patch.

    • Kara no Shoujo is one of the only two non-2013 releases on that list. That’s pretty impressive, I think.

      Hopefully, Cartagra and Kara no Shoujo 2 are going to do well enough that MangaGamer continues importing Innocent Grey’s titles.

  6. Ah man… It was sometimes a hell trying to define the new standard and correct some of the games as such… But it’s all worth it, I’d say! I actually do enjoy the fruits of all the effort put into it.

  7. Glad to see alot of games I liked sold well (Harukoi’s finally starting to feel worth the money now that I’m on Riru’s route). Glad to see longer nukige have sold well; hopefully one of the unannounced releases “in that vein” as you put it turns out to be Kyonyuu Fantasy or something from Atelier Kaguya. Of course if Harukoi did well maybe the good folks at Baseson will let us have another of their games, be it a certain much desired expanded remake or maybe a certain samurai themed game. Or if not maybe some games from its sister brands like Galacrica or Luxury would be nice.
    Looks like 13 turned out to be a lucky number for you guys after all, congrats and here’s to another great year.

  8. Thank you for putting together this article. I always enjoy reading it. Good to see a good mix of games on both lists. Congratulations on a great year.

    I have some questions that I hope you can answer.

    Have the relevant games sold well enough that you will look to release more games in these categories:
    yuri (Demon Master Chris)
    longer non-nukige games (Harukoi Otome)
    indirect sequels/fan-discs/expansions (Tick Tack)
    Limited Editions (many of the hard copy games)

    Has Boob Wars surpassed Koihime Musou as your best selling game?

    Has Go Go Nippon done well enough that Overdrive will consider any of possible additions/expansions/DLC that were mentioned (by Bamboo and by fans) around the time it was originally released?

    • Yes, we’re looking into releasing more of each of those games, but our hints towards releases will come next week in our looking forward post. 😉

      It’s hard to say. I believe Koihime Musou is still standing at the top, but it’s also been on sale for longer than Boob Wars.

      Right now we’re all actually very interested in seeing how Go Go Nippon’s Steam release is going, but considerations haven’t been forgotten at all.

  9. Oh yea I like the jab at JAST. they released 2 games last year? :p

  10. I see Harukoi is pretty high up there, but did it actually sell enough to satisfy you guys? Translating 3mb(2,3 bytes per character) of text at $0.05 per character still adds up to 50-60 grand alone, nevermind whatever it cost to license, so it probably had to pull in 1k+ numbers just to break even.

    • Harukoi’s numbers certainly could have been better, but they are currently within expectations. It wasn’t a huge hit in terms of profit margin, but it made what we anticipated.

      • Well, I guess being able to break even itself is a pretty good sign for games of that scale. Maybe you can spin it to Nexton as indirectly feeding more sales into Koihime or something? I didn’t expect to still see that in the charts, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see some buyers correlation going on there.

  11. I very much enjoy reading these “End of the Year” posts.

    I’ve been wondering: How many people has MG employed full-time at the moment? And how many part-time?

    • That would depend on your definition of full-time versus part time. We have a very few (maybe only 2-3 people?) listed as “full-time”, but our main translators and our editor have what could be considered a full-time job’s worth of projects to work on.

  12. Are you satisfied with your top selling novels’ achievement? Especially the hard copies’ sales.
    Were you expecting more from some of them, perhaps from kara no shoujo?

    • Boob Wars, Eroge, and Demon Master Chris all exceeded expectations. The others are about where we anticipated, so we’re satisfied with all of them. Though higher numbers are always better, since that means more resources to produce more games with.

  13. Then which is the biggest let-down?
    Not necessarily the one who sold the less, but the one you believed in and was received with distrust?

    • Both of the ef releases were probably the lowest selling products we’ve released. While it doesn’t really surprise me, it is a bit disappointing given the work that went into them.

  14. Phantom Thief 1412

    Obviously ef – the later tale wouldn’t be there. It only had 11 days to compete with everyone else! And it came out after everyone’s been through the money-hole that is Christmas! Maybe it will get on the Top 10 for 2014.

    The real surprise would be Touma Kojirou, which reached the Top 10 (admittedly at 10) with only 1 month release. Hope that means that more detective-y games might be up for consideration…

  15. Chou Dengeki in beta testing! I guess that’s a good sing!

  16. Thanks for posting this and to all the people who have done “look back” post – it’s been an interesting read.

    I’m quite happy that Bukkake Ranch seems to have done well. Hopefully this could mean we will get more monster girls down the road? 🙂
    Though i suspect the selling point is more likely the “gameplay” element, rather than the monster girls.

    Personally i enjoyed Eroge alot (some routes more than others) and am happy to purchase more Nukige of that lenght. I am however hesitant about Ultimate Boob Wars. More often than not, I have been disappointed with SHS games. I hope we will get some tester’s corner on that game soon.

    Finally I pledge to work on bringing down my backlog of story focused titles! 🙂

  17. I’m happy Eroge is doing well, hope this means we might see some more Clock Up in the future. Kinda disappointed with Ef sales, I liked both games and I’m surprised as to why they haven’t done better.

  18. Thoughts:
    – Eroge on top spot was to be expected *sigh*
    – I hope DMC on second place is enough to get the successor
    – I’m relieved that Harukoi still made it on third place since I don’t want BaseSon to get too disappointed
    – It’s typical that the most silly SHS title Bukkake Ranch sold the best, though I’m kind of satisfied that the Greatest Inventions was even behind SSSS and even Touma might have beaten it if it would have been released earlier
    – Nice to see Kara no Shojo and Koihime Musou in the top ten again and Otoboku and Shuffle! in the top three hard copies. Quality sells!!!
    – Seeing Tick Tack below Bukkake Ranch hurts although fifth place is still a decent ranking
    – Judging by the good sells of Bukkake Ranch, DMC and Boob Wars, gameplay titles seem to sell well *hint*Eushully*hint*

    And the biggest satisfaction for me: Not even one rape hentai title made it into the top ten, just like last year.

    • That hate for Greatest Inventions… =( Poor Kyousuke, so misunderstood.

    • I’d like anything from Nyaatrap, honestly. The successor, the other new game he talks about (that may just be in an idea stage), Star Maiden Astraea Rio….

      I’m happy MangaGamer offers a wide range of games, but I am also pleased that no rape hentai titles made the list again.

      • I can’t agree more with AZ when it comes to Nyaatrap. I loved Demon Master Chris, despite the fact that it was short and didn’t have a lot of scenes. Even with these “flaws” it was still a very highly enjoyable game for me. I just love the artwork as well. That kind of art style just draws me in. So I really want to see more from them. That’s why I’m happy that Demon Master Chris did so well.

        Also congratulations MangaGamer! You guys really have come a long way. I’ve enjoyed a plethora of visual novels because of you and I just can’t thank you enough. Keep up the good work! ^^

  19. Harukoi outsold Tick Tack? Impossibru!

  20. How did the two Hentai Industries titles fare, compared to your expectations?

  21. Nukige in the top, nothing surprising. I am glad that made ​​their way into the top 10 games aimed more on the story. In addition to the announced Really? Really! and Da capo 3, hope to see a continuation of such games as Otoboku and Greatest Inventions, as well as games from Baseson.

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