Hi Sadler,
thanks for your email (honestly!) and your concerns.
Eventually it's a balancing act. We're talking to NightWolve already.
In the meantime we're offering the translated discs for free to everybody.
Nightwolve, can you confirm he's spoken to you and is trying to make things right?
Yeah, I got this response:
Hi,
thanks for your email (honestly!) and sorry to hear that you feel
like this. Of course there's little we can say to remedy the situation
as is, still let me tell you little more about our point of view and -
hey - maybe there's some common ground we can find.
Let me first comment on the general availability of a game like this.
For years (literally, I think first at least 6 or 7 years ago) I have
been approached to do a packaging concept along with manual for the game.
Obviously to go along with your work on the game. Over the years this
piled up to dozens of requests - with Xak topping the list above
everything else (which I don't really get, but ok).
It never happened, mainly due to the very reasons you've listed
yourself last night. When last year we teamed up to do a line of PCE
repros we created a list of titles based on popularity and especially
on past and recent feedback. Again Xak ended up on the list (obviously),
not without at least a few concerns left.
But what dramatically changed over the past years is the general
market and availability of translated repros for all kinds of systems.
And with that definitely the perception and standards of the users
changed as well. I doubt that there's a single SNES RPG, which has
been translated at some point, that you cannot purchase on a repro
cart within a heartbeat. Moral scruples aside, if one repro maker won't
offer it, a dozen others will.
What does anybody gain if you (not you personally, but generally
speaking) keep telling people that a game isn't available, while it
is available everywhere on the web? You're segregating users. You
grant emu users access to your work, but deny it to users who don't
emulate, don't download, don't burn CDs, no matter how much they
admire your work.
This is what we think - as a team - not about your work in particular,
but in general about all the translations, rom hacks, alternations
and everything else that the community creates. Every user should be
able to choose for himself. Download it for free or buy a nice looking
package to put it on a shelf.
Second there's of course the monetization.
And let me assure you, I hear you on this. And I would certainly agree
to we should (morally) have contacted you beforehand. But as unethical
as it might sound, I have seen too many licensing negotiations and deals
gone wrong - eventually just endangering a project from the start.
You're easy to say that we should have contacted you, but to tell you
what ? To present you with a fait accompli ? This wouldn't have made
a difference to your standpoint. We honestly believe that it's easier
to have a product to show that people really love first. For the very
reasons outlined before.
Usually when you start paying people or agree on royalties, repros
end up being so expensive that only the elitists can afford them.
If you have a look on sites like Nintendoage or Atariage where single
game repros end up being $100+ just because they need to recover the
costs of a proto purchase. This doesn't help anybody.
Obviously you have an idea on what money we are making with a repro
release like this, but I can do the math for you (if needed) and you
will see there's practically no money in a limited run like this.
This changes when a game's selling well and you end up a doing another
run, but we're far from this.
We're not against sharing, but I hardly see a way to keep it fair for
both sides, while not endangering a release at all. The margin for
negotiation is thin and the problems start when one party isn't able
to see that.
>From what I gather you had your share of bad experiences before with
XSeed using one of your translations for a commercial release (sorry
if I got that wrong, I just skimmed the google hits). That's bad -
but you make it sound as if this (Xak) was the same. I guess you agree
that you cannot compare a 50,000 pcs run to a 100 pcs run.
We would very much like to come to an agreement, but when you lament
about a $100,000 loss for doing a (free) translation like this, that's
a non-starter. On a commercial release with 100,000 copies $1 a pop would
be fair, but what does a $1 a pop accomplish on a 100 piece edition ?
But please prove us wrong. Tell us what your idea of a fair agreement
would look like or would have looked like.
When we announced the project yesterday, we got two emails in the
same tone - out of a several dozens not giving a f**k and admiring
the product instead. Still these two emails (along with yours) are
the ones that hurt and the ones you want to make it right for.
So, let's find a common ground. Don't fight the users.
For a start we will make the games available for everybody for free.
Free discs, free shipping as stock lasts. Allow users to enjoy YOUR
work on their classic hardware and allow users (who wish to) to pay
a premium to get our packaging and print work.
Please let us continue to talk about this! A little less emotion
maybe compared to yesterday's email would be nice though.
With good faith and best regards
Tobias, Shlomo, Vasyl, Hubert.
I haven't decided how to respond yet. If I take a cut, I have to track down Paul England (Xak III translator) and offer him a %, so I gotta represent him too. If I tell him [Tobias] to f--k off, he pockets 100% as planned and obviously preferred by the way he's already lowballing it to a $1 a pop... As we know from his past, he's a known liar that pressed Sapphire bootlegs/counterfeits and lyingly tried to pass them off as originals, both to survive eBay's standards/regulations and to maximize profit, etc. Already this response doesn't come off as honest to me, so not a totally positive sign, but I understand he's totally giving away the loose CDs for free now as a result of my "charming" nastygram, so eh, there's some conciliatory action at least.
I expected him to either ignore me or flip me the bird, so I am somewhat surprised!
Ya know, if I had to do it over again, back then when I was younger and had more energy (Xak III got going about 13 years ago, project started in ~December 2001), I'd try like a GoFundMe or Kickstarter fundraising pitch and what not - those sites weren't around back then, but yeah. So the pitch would be something like, "Hey, do you wanna see Dragon Slayer II translated?" Level 1 Fundraising Goal say $5000 to pay for me and any needed co-programmers and a translator to produce an unlicensed English translation software patch. Level 2 an additional $x,xxx ($5k-$15k) to fundraise for an official license if possible to be able to distribute it with the full game itself, either digital download as well or fancy plastic, etc.
I didn't even have a Paypal icon for donations most of that early period, I added it in 2004, and the first donation came a year later on February 2005 from France! Heh, so viva la France I say even with some sarcasm.
I still know the guy (adol1976), too.
Anyway, I did get messaged with a show of concern about Emerald Dragon. I wouldn't sort of rage quit over something like this. In fact, I'm used to it, as well as other forms of abuse by Ys F.A.N.s like libeling/demonizing on 4chan/GameFAQs/Romhackinghacks.net/Ancient Land of Ys/etc., extortion threats, a creepy sort of monitoring over the years with "cyber-shadowboxing" (e.g. omgfloofy/Kirsten Miller, Spinner8, Kitsune Sniper, Psycho John Schizomaniak of HG101 who caught a libel lawsuit for such behavior with people who weren't gonna stand for it!), etc.!
Here's the thing, we all got baggage, myself included, even Tru who was mentioned regarding SO II. Here's a list of similar things by people I knew, unlike Tobias:
1) In October 2002, someone caught Tru selling a CD-R of Xak III on eBay for $5 bucks and messaged me about it. That damaged our friendship, and we stopped speaking to each other for years. He used to run a CD-R backup business after all like Ninja was offering to do not that long ago. Tru had all the popular games ready for $5 each, and he had customers back then because in an era of 56 kbps modems and buggy burner software and hardware, there was plenty demand!
Some good came later though, he apologized, we made up for the most part, and at some point, he voiced interest in becoming like me in terms of translation projects, so I gave up SO II as apart of my umbrella. I gave him a script extraction in my translation software, taught him the principles behind things and so forth and sent him on his way. He eventually produced a patch, although the font is 16x16 and he never recruited a real human translator, so I can't speak to the quality of the work. SignOfZeta said it was good, I recall. Well, a bit of irony in that Tobias is now selling Tru's SO II work without prior communication/consent.
At least it's a pressed CD-ROM instead of a shitty CD-R, right ? Heh-heh.
2) A friend of mine caught Shimarisu, the main Ys IV translator, selling CD-Rs of Ys IV with original copies. She had moved to Japan, had an eBay store and would find lots of original PC Engine copies, so she'd make a pre-patched CD-R to complement the sale of an original and boost the price. If she had shown respect and mentioned it, I would not have objected nor bothered to negotiate a "cut," but it's the sneaking around that bothered me most and then someone else catching it and reporting it to me. As with Tru, that ended our friendship. Down the road she apologized, but I just sort of moved on and our many chats on AIM never resumed. Lost touch with her totally. Unlike Tobias and Tru, at least she had SOME work hours into the English translation of it, as opposed to nothing to do with the project! I guess you can say that... Her defense was, "Hey, it IS my translation!!"
3) I randomly ran into a website once trying to sell Ys IV pre-patched CD-Rs for $30 bucks. It was hard to believe people would pay that much, but that was the price I would see there for a long time. I don't remember if I sent the ahole a nastygram, but I do remember seeing the sales ad. I don't respond to everything on the Internet somehow involving me, if I did I'd be a pretty busy man...
4) I guess this biggest backstab of them all with sheer criminality was Jeff Nussbaum (main Ys translator) and Thomas Lipschultz (Ys Typing Tutor translator and the Felghana manuals) after he was hired by an outfit called
XSEED Games... I don't need to rehash all that here, I can just refer to this link...
So with all that over many years, why would I quit Emerald Dragon ? Sure, I mostly hate Ys F.A.N.s, I hate plenty of people involved in this stuff, but unfortunately, fan translating videogames is too much a part of me and I can't totally excise it out of my list of interests in life, no matter how hard I tried. I took a break from it for many years, I had to for offline reasons even if a well-known incident with the Felghana patch being leaked never happened, I still had to break from such work, but yeah, I don't mind picking up a project here and there again. It's something I still find myself enjoying to do. :/ I do find it hilarious though that Tobias wound up being yet another one of my f--king freeloaders in the 99% column! With him, you gotta open your wallet upfront, of course!
