I should note that the Taimanin films are not parodies. Rather, they are official live-action adaptations, authorised by the original games' developer. As such, the costumes are going to be of a higher quality. Though that's not to say that porn parodies don't have good-quality costumes.

This happened just as a purchased my first comic from them. Now I can't seem to even download it from them, even after resetting my password. Talk about bad timing and poor first impressions…

For anyone interested, the in-game social network Byrdr is actually a real thing:

Sure, releasing games with mass appeal will net more income in the short term, but it doesn't encourage people with more obscure tastes to buy the system or any games. For a system to be successful, there has to be games that appeal to a wide variety of demographics. In other words, the more people who own a Nintendo…

I think it's important to remember that people have different tastes when it comes to games. For example, out of all the games you've mentioned, none of them especially interest me.

I had a look at some of his designs on his website, and I'm quite frankly unimpressed. Sure, minimalism is good, but there's a fine line where your design just becomes bland and uninteresting.

What an interesting article! Thank you for sharing your experiences with us. :-)

Kotaku has never been purely about games. They post news about anything that might appeal to their audience. If you only want news about games, use Kotaku Core. Some of us do like to read articles like this that, while not necessarily related to games, are definitely of interest to us.

I never really had much hope for this game, but still quite curious about it, so I'd like to play it eventually. I've got higher priorities, though.

There is no public record of this. Valve just send an email back to the publisher who submitted the game. But think about it — the only reason why they created Greenlight in the first place is because they were not confident in their approval process. To quote Valve:

What you say is true. A lot of Japanese companies don't understand the Western market, which is why publishers that localise Japanese indie games such as Nyu Media and Playism are so important. Some of these games have managed to make it onto Steam and hopefully more will follow suit.

That's true. I think this is unfortunate, but Valve do have every right to refuse a game to be on Steam. It's their service/platform, after all, so I respect their rights. I just feel it's a shame that companies need to be careful about these sorts of things.

Well, they're certainly some of the best-selling games in the Japanese PC market. Popular enough to get manga and anime adaptations (that have subsequently been released in the West), etc..

I do know specific examples of Japanese PC games that have been submitted to Steam and refused, but that sort of information is confidential, sorry.

Just yesterday, top Japanese PC game developer Visual Art's released an English version of their game Planetarian on the iOS App Store. This came as a surprise to everyone, but shows that these companies are interested in the overseas market. In fact, numerous Japanese companies have been releasing their games in…

Yes, it's precisely the companies like Peach Princess (or more specifically, JAST USA and MangaGamer) who publish these sorts of games. It is up to companies such as these to submit their games to Steam. And that's what they have done, only to be refused.

There are a handful of visual novels that have been submitted to Greenlight, but as far as I'm aware, none of them have been approved, so it would appear that Greenlight is not helping much. In fact, one could argue that the previous Steamworks submission process was more favourable to visual novels, since a number of…

Perhaps "mainstream" was the wrong word. However, these games that have been greenlit have received a huge number of votes. Whilst they may not be mainstream per se, enough people are interested in these games for them to be greenlit. In other words, these games appeal to a large amount of people. Games which appeal…

I see your point. However, games like RapeLay (which is very much a sex-focused game) are very different to, let's say, Steins;Gate (which has no adult content at all). Whilst putting RapeLay on Steam may be a bad idea, I don't think the Western market would have any problems with "all ages" titles.

Indeed. That's one of the great things about Greenlight. Unfortunately, none of the Japanese games that were submitted to Greenlight have been approved. Greenlight favours games that appeal to the mainstream, so it's not helping too much. It's a start, though.