The Predatory Hentai Game Publisher SakuraGame
On August 11th, 2016, a game went up on Steam called Super Star, developed by a group called SakuraGame. Yes, it's all one word. They're a development house stationed in Hong Kong, China, and they released four games into May of 2017. Then, they released something called Material Girl, a game not listed as developed by them, only published. The developer for that game was Dieselmine.
Dieselmine is a hentai circle.
My original article was going to focus on this angle, but then I found out more, and the story grew from a very strange tale of a group of Chinese devs getting poorly translated hentai games on Steam to one of predatory business tactics and sheer ineptitude. This is the story of SakuraGame, a failed mobile developer who's cheated and stolen from names both big and small, capitalizing on the groundwork left by some of the scummiest “developers” who have ever used Steam.
SakuraGame is headed by a man named (supposedly) Patrick Zu. He resides in Hong Kong, at least according to his Twitter account (@Nighthawk_seven) and a Chinese blog I tracked down from his mentioning of it on his Steam page. Originally, I was amused by how odd his group was. I think the games they have labeled as theirs were made by them, or at least by developers working closely with them who wanted their work on Steam, since the early releases have said developers hanging in the discussion forums at times. Super Star has given me a good few hours of laughs (THEY JUST TRACED OVER AN ACTUAL PICTURE OF SHELDON FROM THE BIG BANG THEORY), while Hell Girls was just poor, enough to convince me there was no reason to try any of their other games. I couldn't peg down just what sort of studio they were, since they didn't really seem to have much consistency between releases beyond bad translations, and then they just started releasing literal porn games from other developers on Steam. They even use screenshots in the original Japanese because they're already made and they don't have to wait to start advertising the game before they make progress with the translation.
I'd be fine with all of this, and even kind of love them for the sheer openness of their messy practices, if not for a particularly nasty piece of news I came across.
The developer of a game called New Glass shared some information on their dealings with SakuraGame, and none of it is good. Basically, negotiations to get the game on Steam started poorly as the developer wanted a higher price and more from royalties and such. When they asked for a contract, their game's name was misspelled, among other mistakes, and when they asked to see some sales data, they said no. After, they said the dev should just finish the contract (despite how easy it could be for them to change it after they got the signed agreement), and then said dev found out how poor quality the translations were. Then they saw their game has a Steam page. They hadn't agreed to anything yet, and they hadn't sent them any game files.
Things get worse. It turns out the company is a mobile dev group, with Super Star being a combination of three of their failed releases – and it directly traces over art from Love Plus, among other work I'm sure. They're a group that outright steals from others and tricks hentai game circles into bad deals. Everything they've released is ridiculously cheap, enough for them to make a profit, but not the devs who actually made the titles. You can also bet they're profiting from the Steam card system that every scummy dev under the sun has tried to abuse, which would explain why they offer refunds so ready and available.
See, there was an influx of people releasing games that were just Unity store base assets meant to be used by devs needing something completed to work with and learn from. The most famous of them, Digital Homicide, were counting on making money from abusing the Steam trading card system. Games released on Steam could include cards that would be unlocked as you played via random drops, but getting a full set to make badges would be impossible without trading or buying on the Steam marketplace. With some bots and a lot of key giveaways, you could make a pretty penny without any significant effort. That abuse has been ironed out a bit now, but with SakuraGame selling titles for so low, they can easily reach the required sales quickly to gain access to the card system.
All of this makes their terrible translations suddenly kind of vile instead of amusing (simply a product of sheer laziness instead of language barriers), especially when you realize they're actively making these games worse in other ways. In a game they helped put on Steam called “Cat Girl” (not the actual name), all of the hentai scenes are already unlocked at game start, making the entire point of the game meaningless. Wild guess that the developer never intended to have that done. Add in their no strings attached refund policy and it all starts to smell pretty quickly.
If you've been thinking of trying something they have on Steam, don't. The sheer amount of disrespect they show for other developers and artists is inexcusable. No matter how so-bad-its-good Super Star was, I don't want to support people hunting and using the hard work of others for dirty money like this. You shouldn't either. If you're genuinely interested in the games they've been publishing from other parties, go find them on DLsite or DMM, maybe find the devs and express interest in proper translations. There's no need to support the business practices of people ripping off the hard work of others.
Dieselmine is a hentai circle.
My original article was going to focus on this angle, but then I found out more, and the story grew from a very strange tale of a group of Chinese devs getting poorly translated hentai games on Steam to one of predatory business tactics and sheer ineptitude. This is the story of SakuraGame, a failed mobile developer who's cheated and stolen from names both big and small, capitalizing on the groundwork left by some of the scummiest “developers” who have ever used Steam.
SakuraGame is headed by a man named (supposedly) Patrick Zu. He resides in Hong Kong, at least according to his Twitter account (@Nighthawk_seven) and a Chinese blog I tracked down from his mentioning of it on his Steam page. Originally, I was amused by how odd his group was. I think the games they have labeled as theirs were made by them, or at least by developers working closely with them who wanted their work on Steam, since the early releases have said developers hanging in the discussion forums at times. Super Star has given me a good few hours of laughs (THEY JUST TRACED OVER AN ACTUAL PICTURE OF SHELDON FROM THE BIG BANG THEORY), while Hell Girls was just poor, enough to convince me there was no reason to try any of their other games. I couldn't peg down just what sort of studio they were, since they didn't really seem to have much consistency between releases beyond bad translations, and then they just started releasing literal porn games from other developers on Steam. They even use screenshots in the original Japanese because they're already made and they don't have to wait to start advertising the game before they make progress with the translation.
I'd be fine with all of this, and even kind of love them for the sheer openness of their messy practices, if not for a particularly nasty piece of news I came across.
The developer of a game called New Glass shared some information on their dealings with SakuraGame, and none of it is good. Basically, negotiations to get the game on Steam started poorly as the developer wanted a higher price and more from royalties and such. When they asked for a contract, their game's name was misspelled, among other mistakes, and when they asked to see some sales data, they said no. After, they said the dev should just finish the contract (despite how easy it could be for them to change it after they got the signed agreement), and then said dev found out how poor quality the translations were. Then they saw their game has a Steam page. They hadn't agreed to anything yet, and they hadn't sent them any game files.
Things get worse. It turns out the company is a mobile dev group, with Super Star being a combination of three of their failed releases – and it directly traces over art from Love Plus, among other work I'm sure. They're a group that outright steals from others and tricks hentai game circles into bad deals. Everything they've released is ridiculously cheap, enough for them to make a profit, but not the devs who actually made the titles. You can also bet they're profiting from the Steam card system that every scummy dev under the sun has tried to abuse, which would explain why they offer refunds so ready and available.
See, there was an influx of people releasing games that were just Unity store base assets meant to be used by devs needing something completed to work with and learn from. The most famous of them, Digital Homicide, were counting on making money from abusing the Steam trading card system. Games released on Steam could include cards that would be unlocked as you played via random drops, but getting a full set to make badges would be impossible without trading or buying on the Steam marketplace. With some bots and a lot of key giveaways, you could make a pretty penny without any significant effort. That abuse has been ironed out a bit now, but with SakuraGame selling titles for so low, they can easily reach the required sales quickly to gain access to the card system.
All of this makes their terrible translations suddenly kind of vile instead of amusing (simply a product of sheer laziness instead of language barriers), especially when you realize they're actively making these games worse in other ways. In a game they helped put on Steam called “Cat Girl” (not the actual name), all of the hentai scenes are already unlocked at game start, making the entire point of the game meaningless. Wild guess that the developer never intended to have that done. Add in their no strings attached refund policy and it all starts to smell pretty quickly.
If you've been thinking of trying something they have on Steam, don't. The sheer amount of disrespect they show for other developers and artists is inexcusable. No matter how so-bad-its-good Super Star was, I don't want to support people hunting and using the hard work of others for dirty money like this. You shouldn't either. If you're genuinely interested in the games they've been publishing from other parties, go find them on DLsite or DMM, maybe find the devs and express interest in proper translations. There's no need to support the business practices of people ripping off the hard work of others.
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