Update from Sekai:
Hey everyone! First of all, everyone at Sekai Project would just like to apologize for the lack of answers pertaining to our plans for releasing Grisaia on the PSVita. I will try share some of the difficulties surrounding this development as well as the progress that’s been made.
I am Audi, and I’ve known many of the crew at Sekai Project dating back nearly 10 years now. I have worked in the games industry since the mid 2000’s, which has spanned companies in Europe, Japan and the US. I was also one of the closest friends of VN music legend Umemoto Ryu, and had the honor of spending time with him shortly before his passing. During GDC of this year, I discussed the various upcoming projects as well as the issues Sekai faced with getting proper contact with Sony in order to get their titles onto Sony’s services. It just so happened that my previous job had me doing this sorts of work in Europe, and as such I offered to help speed up this process.
Over the last few months, I have become part of the team and concentrated my efforts on improving key areas of this wonderful company, namely our front on the digital handheld market such as PSN, as well as proper community communication. And I’m glad to say that we’ve now been able to progress rapidly and should have some very good news for Grisaia fans in the coming weeks! While the lack of communication on this issue is unfortunate, it is important to take the amount of work that is needed into consideration, and that the team at Sekai Project never stopped working hard on this even before I teamed up with them. In order to be approved, let alone have your titles viable to be put on a service like PSN requires a lot of paperwork, not to mention legalities from Japan, cleared up. GDD (Game Design Documents) need to be made from scratch to fully explain the game inside and out, content needs to be accurately presented and explained, and the list goes on. While we are all lifelong gaming enthusiasts and lovers of VN, the world of publishing a game can be a jungle of technicalities and confusion if you never walked through it before. I’ll avoid getting too deeply into all the hoops in getting games published, but it’s sadly not as simple as uploading a file and wait for a happy answer.
But now that we been able to mostly clear up all obstacles that stood in the way of getting this game and the others we got in the pipeline onto the PSN service, we will work hard at bringing more surprises and continue our support for the VN genre. We will of course also keep you continuously updated on the progress with further games scheduled onto the PSVita.
One of my main reason to join up with this great group was the devotion, passion and honesty that Sekai put into their work for a genre as dear to me as VN, and over the coming months I hope to see many of you, the fans, the backers, and the many new followers of visual novels, to see the very same passion and pride from Sekai’s company output as I get to enjoy every single day.
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So, hopefully will get an update soon as seems progress is finally been made.
