A couple of days ago HuneX (producing/developing games such as Arcana Famiglia, Meiji Tokyo Renka, Possession Magenta and Believer) started a crowdfunding campaign to get one of their latest games, Steam Prison (released on PC in December 2016), to be ported to the PS Vita and to get people to know about it. The name of the crowdfunding project is 「スチプリを多くの人に知ってほしい！」(if I’m gonna roughly translate it, basically it’s saying “We wish for more people to know Steam Prison!”). Based on what I’ve been seeing on my twitter and a twitter mutual telling me their experience with it, it seems like an alright game. Their goal of 250,000 yen had been met on the first day of the campaign and is right now 611% funded at 1.5 million yen and counting. There’s still 51 days left until the campaign ends, but of course, we foreigners can’t partake in the crowdfunding bc it seems like more of a national thing and prolly would only ship within Japan.
The backer tiers in the crowdfunding campaign includes blanket covers of the dudes for the higher tiers, your name in the credits of the ported PS Vita game for any contribution, signatures from cast members, badges, acrylic stands, an official cosplay outfit based on the heroine’s clothes (no one has yet claimed that tier yet, it is worth 200,000 yen after all) and even a ticket to an event with a few of the cast members called a “high five meeting” or something, prolly where you high five Yusuke Shirai for an hour. The stretch goal of getting one of the male support characters to get a route in the PS Vita port has also been reached at 1 million yen. There are still a few more stretch goals that have yet to be met, one of them being a new opening sung by one of the cast members at 4 million yen, another goal is a memorial book at 2 million yen that may or may not be distributed as something free.
Now this begs the question as to why doesn’t HuneX do the port with their own funding? Not exactly sure how to answer this, I can only speculate. So take this with a grain of salt. It might be because of the low sales that they may not be confident about putting out a Vita port or that there’s no money to spare for it so they take it to crowdfunding. Some speculate the low sales is because of the measures HuneX went to to make sure that the game won’t be pirated that may have caused inconveniences or discouraged ppl, whatever that may mean, who knows. I was a bit interested at getting it but was a bit worried bc of how I was burnt by HuneX before when I got Possession Magenta which also looked promising but the story lacked and poorly executed. Also I’m not the type of person that likes to play otome games on my laptop, I’d rather it on my PS Vita so I can lay around and take it on the go like a book. Plus there’s advantages to otome games being on PS Vita, like not having to worry about ppl pirating the game and depending on how you scale your images in your game, the resolution of CGs and character sprites are so crisp and nice to look at compared to other portable consoles like 3DS, PSP etc.
So what I’m saying is that I’ll be looking forward to whenever they decide to port the game to the PS Vita, though I don’t know exactly how long it takes for a company to port a PC game to a Vita so it may take some time. However I hope that this doesn’t become a trend for other otome game companies to do crowdfunding for their projects often, worst case scenario would be that certain companies would only release their games if the crowdfunding was successful or not and would then rely heavily on the pockets of the consumers when deciding to greenlight a project. But that’s just worst case scenario and prolly won’t happen… hopefully.
There’s also a demo/trial version of the PC version of Steam Prison which you can download on their website. The file is 1.93 GB and will take a while to download, the site also warns it can be played on a Japanese version of Windows OS, I’m not sure if that means it can run on your windows computer/laptop if you have it on “Japanese Locale” so I’m not sure if it’ll work on my laptop despite having Japanese Locale on. I haven’t tested it out yet, so maybe I’ll do a follow up post on my thoughts on the demo and if I found trouble running it I’ll just edit this post to say I’ve been gaijin blocked or something.
As always thanks for reading.
