Code Of Princess’ Director/Producer Talks With Siliconera

The floating tool you mention of was on for a weekend and was an experiment. and wasn’t meant to interfere with reading. That’s something that we try to put first and foremost even though we don’t have as many resources as say Joysitq or larger sites. I don’t think people realize how small Siliconera is and even when we break stories people don’t even remember the work we did (they read the news on other sites and even our readers credit other sites for the work we did with interviews, etc.)

We pulled the floating tool you speak of at the response of the commenters, which I hope are the most loyal readers. The ads have and always been on the side, but if anyone was using adblock before then (and it sure sounds like people were and still are) the discussion isn’t just about that then.

@Siliconera15:disqus :

Thanks for the heads up!  I think it would help if there is a portion of the site dedicated to giving people the heads up on these experiments.

Suddenly throwing a widget like that as an experiment tends to rub people the wrong way.  =/

But yeah, that floating widget was pretty much the only gripe we have.

Fair enough and out of response to these comments we want to listen to our loyal readers so we disabled the sharing button, which we hoped would bring in more readers to expand the site. (Maybe even users that *didn’t* have adblock on.)

Here’s the catch 22 and I’m speaking openly. If we want to upgrade our servers and pay for more bandwidth for the hardcore readership that uses the site the most who is going to help us do that? And if the hardcore readership doesn’t support us, who will?

Each visitor takes up server resources. So, if someone didn’t visit the site at all it’s correct that it wouldn’t bring in revenue, but it wouldn’t add to our bandwidth bill either. At the end of the day someone has to pay it and I’d rather it be those corporations than readers. 
In any case, thanks for considering to remove adblocker :)

It’s not the game itself that I’m taking issue with here: It’s the attitude of your initial comment. The video game industry tends to be male-dominated at both ends, and whenever issues dealing with gender are raised, the response is frequently “Your opinion is invalid because this game isn’t meant for you.” Just because you aren’t the target market doesn’t mean that you don’t have a right to state your view on how something affects you. 

The design in this game is pretty clearly pandering to the straight male demographic, and with good reason: As you point out, that demographic is huge. Will @twitter-18829913:disqus ’s comments have any effect whatsoever on this titles success? Almost certainly not, although members of the industry such as myself do visit places like this one to look for opinions on games we might consider localizing. Your comments, on the other hand, continue a long tradition of exclusionary behavior that will ultimately drive away people who could grow and enrich this industry. 

Hm, well, I’m female (are you?  90% of the time I run into this argument on the internet, it’s interestingly posed by a guy), and I don’t take any offense to the way she dresses.  I couldn’t care less what women or anyone else look like in video games because that’s not what I play them for.  Do I like games like Code of Princess?  Not really.  But other people like it, so I’m not going to tell them they can’t have this or that in their game.  I’m sure there are some things I like in -my- games that are offensive to men or some other group. How, may I ask, is the industry excluding me from video games by including things like this in games I have no interest in anyway? Not all games depict half-naked women, so women are hardly excluded. Hell, why don’t we just go say that the video game industry excludes men because guys in RPGs tend to be prettyboys (arguably representing what is supposed to be attractive in men)?

Why, I could sit here and argue that anime often features effeminate, beardless, thin men as attractive, that this is offensive to fat, bearded and/or manly-looking men, and that they should stop doing that, even though men are often not an anime genre’s target audience.  Sounds stupid, doesn’t it?  It’s just a reversal of your argument.

Nothing is going to please everybody, so just give it a rest and move on.

Oh come on Ladius, you are not reading Belisarius’ argument. All he’s saying is that when someone says, “Game x offends me” or “Character Y’s design is silly”, they are entitled to say that without everyone ganging up on them and saying, “this isn’t aimed at you”, “so you want censorship?!” “Well game Z had so and so are you fine with that?!” and you get the point. This happened a few posts back as well with Senran Kagura. And perhaps you feel everyone should be 100% logical, but I have to say that sometimes something rubs me the wrong way and I don’t know why right away.

Not redefine, but perhaps just let them know that there are people who think otherwise and who would play games that are less fan service bait and that women do play things outside otome games. I mean not saying anything isn’t going to change the status quo so I don’t think that’s the right thing to do, so yeah, I do think people have a right to say they don’t like this or that about game design, if only for the reason to let others know there are people who would play something different. People usually make general complaints when they feel something they don’t like is saturating the market and there isn’t enough of something else to counter it. And I have to agree that there aren’t a lot of games where the heroine isn’t used for fan service in recent memory. Games with male protagonists don’t do this because like Belisarius mentioned, devs are mostly male and they believe the gamers are mostly male as well. And again, fans who think otherwise not saying anything won’t change anything. So yeah, I have to say it would be nice if people wouldn’t jump on every single person who says something like what ShiningThing did.

I don’t think criticizing aspects of Japanese design means we are generalizing or somehow discrediting it. In fact, we criticize because we love the medium and want to do better and be more experimental. I love Japanese games, that’s all I play, but I can’t help but feel like there’s been a bit of stagnation in the themes and designs for awhile now. It’s probably the shrinking Japanese market, which makes me sad.

Sorry I had to just let that out. It’s been bothering me for awhile now.