JRPGs have always had something of a rough go in the West, as they’ve always have been more of a challenge to localize and their audience is considered more of a niche. However, localizing JRPGs has gotten more challenging more recently, enhanced by the market differences that puts more primacy on the PSP in Japan than it receives elsewhere. However, Victor Ireland of Gaijinworks saw an opportunity with the rising phenomenon of Kickstarter for gaming to start one for Class of Heroes 2. We caught up with Ireland, who’s fought the fight of localizing Japanese for over two decades, about this latest initiative.

[a]list: Tell me about how this particular project got put together.

Victor Ireland: MonkeyPaw Games and Gaijinworks have been working together for over two years,  on projects seen and (so far) unseen. We started by getting the old Working Designs games I did on PSN and while that was underway we were looking for expanding our company relationship with some new localizations of RPG and related product as sort of a Working Designs 2.0. That’s when we started talking to Japanese publishers and laying the groundwork for what we’re doing now. I initially brought up doing something like Kickstarter idea early last year, and it really became a goal around last Fall for us to get a console product up with one.

[a]list: Do you hope that this will lead to certain more niche JRPG titles to get their funding without having to deal with doubting publishers?

Victor Ireland: We’re actually in the publishing position, and we have no doubts. The doubt for a niche localization publisher in this position traditionally comes in from either the Japanese publisher (doubtful of licensing or asking crazy license fees), the retailers (not interested in stocking adequate product, sometimes 1 per store or less), or the console maker, who must approve a product that will take up space on their retailer’s shelves and may not approve it so they can reserve shelf space for more mainstream product.

Kickstarter for a direct to fan physical publishing model solves two of the three, and a lot of discussion and a track record in the segment helps with the doubting Japanese publishers. One of our goals in getting this Kickstarter to the funding goal is to make it easier to convince them that this is a viable model, making ongoing and future negotiations for other products we’re targeting easier.

[a]list: Is there a general feeling right now among the game development community that Kickstarter is a game changer?

Victor Ireland: I think there’s a strong feeling that it’s a potential game changer. There’s not enough history to absolutely say it’s a game changer yet, but the possibilities it opens up for a direct relationship with fans that bypasses many traditional roadblocks to wanted projects are definitely tantalizing and could very well be a permanent game-changer.

[a]list: Why was Class of Heroes 2 chosen to be the first Kickstarter experiment for you guys?

Victor Ireland: It’s one of many titles that are on our list of licensing targets. I personally like the game and CoH3, CoH4 as well, so they were on our radar and we were actively involved in talking to the Japanese publisher for them as well as other publishers for other titles.

But Kickstarter is a new model — a new way of doing something and it’s really, really hard to get a Japanese company that is risk-averse to jumping on board. They’re mostly taking the wait and see approach to this. Acquire was willing to roll the dice with us and try this new way to reach fans that really want the games but have been denied, which is a huge credit to them.

If we can succeed and get this to fund, it will help move publishers we’re talking to off the fence and everything gets a little easier for the second time. We could have kept talking to all of them to try to get a different game for another 6-8-12 months, but that would have been no guarantee of success, either, and the PSP was already fading in the U.S. market. So we found a great partner in Acquire to get this done now and get the ball rolling. Its success is key to helping us start checking off other games in our long last of titles we want to do and making them a reality.

Fortunately the Vita’s PSP compatibility helps widen the market for PSP RPGs, and that’s one reason we’re still looking at PSP RPGs. There’s so many good ones in Japan that need to come over.

[a]list: What have you learned since you started this project about this sort of crowdsourcing?

Victor Ireland: Even if you think you know what the fans want, you can’t possibly know it all, and you’ll have to adjust. Our constraints on a console title are different than a PC title because there are more approvals involved from the console maker, etc, so some of the things the fans were telling us they wanted weren’t possible, but we changed a couple tiers shortly after launching the Kickstarter due specifically to fan requests for a digital version of the arranged soundtrack and a digital code to go with the physical deluxe pack for Vita owners.

We also learned the hard way that modifying rewards after launch is messy on Kickstarter. You can’t delete or change a reward tier that has even 1 backer. So for a while we had two $20 and $100 tiers, a “good” one with the fan requests added, and a “bad” one that we launched with . We were able to migrate all the original $20 users to the new tier and then delete the old one, but we’re still waiting for the last 2 on the $100 tier to move so we can delete it. It’s the main reason we haven’t modified two other tiers — too confusing to have doubles until you can migrate users. This kind of confusing management tools and limitations make Kickstarter a little difficult to use, but I’m sure these kind of issues will be worked out over time. Overall, it’s a pretty cool platform, but there’s definitely a learning curve.

[a]list: Why did you decide to make the Deluxe edition a central part of this Kickstarter campaign?

Victor Ireland: Because the trend for niche products seems to be moving towards digital-only releases, and fans that happen to be collectors, including me, aren’t necessarily happy about it. This was a way to give fans that wanted a premium physical product experience to get that, and still provide a digital download only for those that don’t want the physical product.

[a]list: Assuming this is successful, do you see other similar Kickstarters for localized JRPGs?

Victor Ireland: Sure. The only negative in this situation is if we don’t fund. That can make it harder for console JRPGs to do this. But if we get the fan support to fund In that situation, the sky’s the limit, because we can go back to all the Japanese publishers we’re talking to or negotiating with that are “on the fence” for other titles we and the fans we’ve heard from want and show them that the process works and there are fans out there for these titles willing to support them. We’re starting with the title on our list with the smallest base, so if we can succeed in funding it, we can certainly get more support much quicker for other titles that are better known.

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