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Hey there Cafe patrons! I wanted to do my annual check-in with you all to see if anyone is planning on going to GDC in San Francisco, which is coming up at the end of February. I know there are quite a few folks here who are game-industry-connected (or adjacent) so it never hurts to ask. I'll be there showing the early prototype of a game that may possibly be Cafe-relevant.

Anyway, let me know here if you'll be around and maybe we can meet up! Two years ago now there was a Great Cafe Meetup at GDC with me, Nobi, Spoon, and Maese where much booze was consumed and much interesting lore was discussed!

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GDC has always interested me but unfortunately I'm not a dev! Always happy to help out here and there though.

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You could always register as a journalist since you represent one of the oldest still-operating game news sites out there! You could even submit a talk for next year's conference since I know that you have a ton of insight to share with the gamedev community in general.

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[this message was edited by Spoon on Sat 4 Feb 13:39]

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You could always register as a journalist since you represent one of the oldest still-operating game news sites out there! You could even submit a talk for next year's conference since I know that you have a ton of insight to share with the gamedev community in general.


Honestly, Professor, our look for doujin games in Akiba and your explanation of what happened to the whole scene was one of the saddest and most informative things I have had about a gaming scene in awhile. Due to the proliferation of the western indie game scene in Steam and PC, I don't think those circumstances will befall us in the West, but the notion that an entire Dev scene could come and go in the internet age in spite of having created multiple seminal properties is remarkable and noteworthy.

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[this message was edited by Professor on Sat 4 Feb 14:56]

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I don't think there's even a next generation of doujin game developers to begin with. Those left in the scene seem to be mostly old folks and the newer gen of programmers simply go right to the app stores.

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I don't think there's even a next generation of doujin game developers to begin with. Those left in the scene seem to be mostly old folks and the newer gen of programmers simply go right to the app stores.


This is, without a doubt, the worst of all timelines. Surely there's a way to go back to the past and fix it...

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That's back when Bing Bang Beat was about the only fresh new fighting game title, and novel games died off after the Umineko series concluded.

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I took a quick look back at the history of the doujin market and it went like this (at least from my own perspective)--

1990s- The years when the internet wasn't around and later went into its infancy. There used to be doujin-soft only events called the Pasoket (Pasocon Market). People still used floppies and everything looked home-made.

2000s- The years between narrowband and broadband. Pasokets disappeared but we started to see the rise of big-name doujin dev teams. Things were in CDs during the narrowband years and later DVDs during the broadband era. The bigger circles released them in commercial-standard packaging. The doujin soft market inflated in the early to mid 2000s and Akiba had tons of shops dedicated to them.

2010s- The rise of the smartphone killed pretty much all need for people to buy a new PC and by the time we reached the year 2011 most of the doujnin soft shops in Akiba were gone. If people wanted a bigger screen they'd go for tablets instead of laptops; less heavy, longer battery life, no internal drive, no market for physical discs.

I think the doujin game market started seeing its slow death somewhere around 2008-2010. That's back when Bing Bang Beat was about the only fresh new fighting game title, and novel games died off after the Umineko series concluded. PC game makers also started disappearing by then-- Aquaplus is a prime example as they made their smart move into the console market.

The year 2014--which was when this game came out, was probably the last year that doujin shops still had something akin to a recognizable doujin game corner.

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That's back when Bing Bang Beat was about the only fresh new fighting game title, and novel games died off after the Umineko series concluded.
Umineko's ending was so bad that we didn't want to see doujin novel games ever again!

2010 was around the time when the web novel sites Narou and Arcadia were gaining speed (which also signaled the decline in Yaruo storytelling in 2ch). Novel games just wasn't a choice for aspiring writers anymore, it was much more low risk and less time consuming to write on Narou or Arcadia.

Over the past 5 years there were a swarm of people on Narou and Arcadia that got picked up and published into physical books, publishers didn't want to get left behind in this possible gold rush, they just shot book offers to EVERYONE.

For a time maybe 60 of the titles on the top 100 rankings had a publishing deal ongoing. And a bunch of others that haven't even written enough for 1/4 of a book but were already getting a book offer, because publishers didn't want to lose promising authors to other publishers. Instead they would choose to publish one book and cut the story off if sales are bad (because of this we have a bunch of books that have no ending)

Some writers would get offers from multiple big publishers like Enterbrain and Dengeki at the same time, stuff like this just never really happened on a large scale like this before.

So we'll never have a superstar like Type-moon or 07th Expansion ever again, or even any big

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Can you two seriously assemble an article about this, because as depressing as it is to hear, it's incredibly interesting! It certainly isn't something reported in the western games media, and is especially interesting in light of the surge of visual novel and doujin games being released on Steam. On Steam, visual novels seem like a rising niche!

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Can you two seriously assemble an article about this, because as depressing as it is to hear, it's incredibly interesting! It certainly isn't something reported in the western games media, and is especially interesting in light of the surge of visual novel and doujin games being released on Steam. On Steam, visual novels seem like a rising niche!

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