The House in Fata Morgana, a gothic visual novel recently released on the Playism indie platform in Japan, is under consideration for localization. So, why isn’t it already being localized? The same problem as always—money. Playism explain what the hold-up is as follows:
Because we deal with indie developers in our localization work, being paid up front for our localization work is not always possible. We don’t think it’s fair to limit our services to those that have the money stashed away. This is especially unfair when you consider that Japanese independent developers predominantly release their earlier games for free in Japan to gain a reputation, making no money in the process.
As a result, we try our best to accomodate our developers by offering a bevy of options. In the case of Novectacle, their interest in localization is obvious. They stipulated that they wanted 100% of the revenue of Fata Morgana’s sales on Playism JP to go straight towards its EN localization. That truly floored us.
As it stands, though, the sad news is that, so far, Fata Morgana’s sales on Playism JP are far lower than we’d need to fund localization. Is that the end of Fata Morgana?
Playism are currently considering their options, they say. As of now, the two options are: wait and see if sales in Japan pick up, or turn to crowdfunding through Kickstarter/IndieGoGo. We’ll have more to report as the story develops.
