Koikatsu & Honey Select Studio, Illusion Has Shut Down - A SalaryGamedevman In Japan's Perspective

do you know why japan is getting far more stricted laws regarding the content?

I acquired Koikatsu for the obvious reasons… but ended up just getting really into the character creator. Never had an interest in fashion or character design (beyond my player character in an RPG) but after playing a while I’ve ended up making hundreds of unique characters and fixed other people’s designs for them.

Not what I expected I’d be using the game for and it’s been difficult to share with friends which game I’m designing characters in 😅

wrong, there are just problems with unity lately. so companies who rely heavily on Unity would be at risk to shut down D;

F

illusion is the only adult game studio that actually make good adult games. except the censored part people have to make theyre own patch for that. american porn game sucks its garbage

WOAH, have a look at HoneyCome come come party

Hi there! Sorry I'm late to the party, but I have a lot to say, just to get it off my chest. I mean a lot. I have never personally played any of Illusion's games, but I have heard about how notorious RapeLay was at the time and have seen some videos of people talking about it. That is, for containing an underage character, and I can see why. The same can be said for Honey Select, which allowed them to create seemingly underage characters, which I won't go into too much detail about, but you get the idea. I did a little research on it and found it quite surprising and was fascinated by it. Too bad I didn't get a chance to try it out for myself, though (since the game itself was expensive). But I digress.

What I really want to talk about is what Illusion should have come up with that I thought would be interesting to note. What if they took the character customization aspect from Honey Select and created a life simulation game with it? You know, like The Sims. There's been some competition for The Sims franchise lately with Paralives and Life by You currently in development, and I felt like Illusion could have done the same thing if they hadn't had that opportunity. It would have been a great idea, don't you think?

But oh well, since Illgames is a thing now, they could still go for it if they have to. Only time will tell, I guess. But yeah, it's sad that Illusion has to be shut down because of possible legal issues and some crazy stuff, but it is what it is.

Other than that, I guess that's about it! Have a nice day!

Wasn't it leaked that they were just renaming themselves?

There's a massive push by credit card companies to try to quash the sexwork industry. Look at the trouble they've been giving the hub as a good example.

RIP. Pioneers in non visual novel hentai games for PC. I dont know why they have to do this, but be happy it happened

Was looking into Kiokatsu on steam at the moment. Dang, this is some sad news.

R.i.p we didnt have a chance at koikatsu sunshine 😞

Will I still be able to play my favorite sex simulator (KK)?

R.I.P. Illusion. They made the best Girl Design Software in existence, albeit with very basic gameplay and horribly unoptimized resource usage-wize...

I think there is legitimate concern about the gender divide being worse than ever, and the puritanical pressure against adult material. It's attacking an outlet that frustrated people use.

Looking forward to the update video.

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Shocking and heartbreaking😢

Turns out it was just a rebrand and their will release their new project on September 1st, which looks like Honey Select mechanics with Koikatsu artstyle.

i heard some of the staff are now back as a company called illgames (thank god)

lol, I love the production of this video.

"Did you die?"
"Sadly yes... But I LIVED!"

Some of their latest games weren't very good. It went backward in term of interactivity and felt like bad asset flips. Also, the place I used to go to get mods suddenly got abandoned and died (HongFire).

I wonder if thing's would have gone differently if they marketed their products more as software like MMD than games like sims.

A lot of the most consumed content surrounding their games was through an aspect that, to the western audience that bought it on steam, pretty much had to be modded back in.

It sucks that Illusion is shutting down. The Studio app that comes with the games are great tools for artist and for AI image generation.

Gives me slight concern about what could be considered legal precedence in Japan if this is the case; if Illusion cannot create character-creating tools to design a 3D model of another character, then would other Japanese companies that specialize in creating 3D models and 2D renders be in the crosshairs? Foreign companies too (doubt it since it's not really enforceable)?

If Illusion took legal threats to court (although they likely do not have the funds to, from the recent financial failure that was Room Girl), they might be able to beat a few accusations, but large IP holders could likely use different characters within the same IP / different IPs entirely to hold new cases. This is how companies in the US (like Disney, Sony, etc.) tend to abuse their intellectual property against smaller companies, but KKP as a 3D-modeling tool I feel is too broad to classify as "used for the benefit of infringement" without putting other software at risk. Would Blender or Maya be considered as "used for the benefit of infringement" if sufficiently advanced artists and developers created a framework to easily recreate existing characters? One wrong decision could make secondary works in 3D near-impossible for the Japanese fiction community. But this is just wild speculation; if ILLUSION cannot cite their reasons for the shutdown, we essentially don't know the causes until someone from ILLUSION discusses the details at length.

Another perspective: I think that there's also a huge amount of piracy that comes with repacking Illusion's games with popular features, mods, and assets that are not available in the vanilla game + DLC. Pirates forking and improving on their fork of KKP in particular have essentially eliminated the demand to buy KKP through official means if there are distributors for the repacked branch. This may have left ILLUSION with far less revenue than one might expect; paired with minimal sales volume from the relatively high sales price on Steam, and you have a recipe for a massively popular, but massively unprofitable IP because the official product has become inferior to the substitute (that being a home-grown fork in the form of repacks). JP can only carry the sales so far, but eventually the niche for a single product will saturate.

Welp there goes any chance for artificial academy 3

このビデオをありがとう。とても参考になりました。

Good video subbed.

Does this mean that you won’t be able to buy and play their games I was planning on buying koikatsu and honey select in about a year from now

Koikatsu helps with my artwork damnit

It's always sad to see the creators of adult content struggling... with Steam actually allowing those games these days, I'd hoped we were past all of that. Well, Illusion seem a little overfond of setting a high price point for what seems to be mostly the same type of thing, over and over, so perhaps a lack of creativity and variety, exacerbated by price gouging further hurting sales, is one of the main issues here?
Also, nice hair! Not every guy has the guts to grow long hair, but being cool means being yourself. Just ask Conan. ;)

I can say that now I'm in deeply depression! 😭😭😭😭

Sad to see them shutting down, being using Koikatsu since release and its the best char creator and with Studio to produce stuff i have used, never played their old games, only really recent ones and they are pretty bland and simple has a agame, they should have invested a bit more on that part, but really sad to see them going down, but i hope they can cameback even better cause with 30years on their backs shouldnt go in vein.

Pirated Illusion titles for years, didn't think much of it since they were JP only with crude fan text translations. Pirated Koikatsu too but totally bought a Steam copy just as a genuine "thank you".

Thanks for the insightful video! I'm curious about a few things especially regarding the infringement of other Ip's. How can the company be held liable for users creating resembling characters from other ips? Since games like Vrchat and Skyrim modding community or even mmorpgs with good character creation do these things just fine. Also what would you say could be the solution? I'm personally thinking perhaps seperate the two; a character creation tool with certain limitations of usage (however giving the user the possbility to mod it) and the games themselves as a stand alone but it being compatible with the creation tool.

i still play koikatsu sunshine and what happened after illusion shutdown?
this software no longer support and for what

Man this is sad. I've been playing Illusion games for 2 decades.

I can honestly believe the bit about legal troubles with other companies. Nintendo is one of the most notorious companies when it comes to protecting their IPs as there have been instances where they have gone after NSFW art of their characters on Patreon. Cygames is also notorious for their strict guidelines on Uma Musume R18 art, so there's a possibility they took issue with their characters being used in Koikastu.
I don't know what Japanese copyright laws are like, so I don't know if companies like Cygames/Nitendo could actually beat Illusion in court, but I imagine the stress from the threats alone would be enough to make a small company shut down just to avoid potential legal issues.

If I owed koikatsu, I can download it?

Man... an end of an era.

Vid was well put together, and I hadn't considered most of those possibilities (and was largely unaware of the issues with corporations facing harsher censorship than individuals, though that explains a lot in regards to a number of things).

Definitely agree with your points regarding them kind of digging themselves into a hole in regards to focusing too strongly on the character creation aspect without there being a solid game to use those characters in. Bought Koikatsu a few years back, but when they released Koikatsu Sunshine I never really saw the point in 'upgrading' given how little had really changed (especially when the modding community largely agreed to continue making mods for both versions given how similar they were). That said, I'm not too knowledgeable about some of their other titles, as I've only really touched Koikatsu and Sexy Beach 3, and I've heard some (like Artificial Academy) had more actual gameplay. I'd never even heard of Room Girl until I read the comments... which probably doesn't bode well for their sales.

Goddamit I hate the Japanese government. I love Asia, but Japanese society is ass backwards.

I was quite shocked with the news that the company shut down, because I have been playing some of their games since the early 2010s and has been enjoying Koikatsu & Honey Select 2 and using my creativity in the game. Your views certainly answered my questions regarding the matter. Also very good video, I just subscribed to you and looking forward to your new contents man. Also I'm a foreigner that lives in Japan I can relate to you.

The point you made about the IP of existing characters. That does make sense i think. But i would also argue that artists who make art/digital art of the characters, would that also be consiseres stealing the ip too? I understand that modding and creating a 3d depiction of characters and being shared around and bought from the person who made the model could be troublesome. Im not too familiar on how stuff like this works. I make scenes in koikatsus tool and it is honestly really good, expecially for those just getting started in 3d posing

I literally sketch the ideas i have for characters using koikatsu to have a rough idea about what looks good and what doesn't, before actually getting to drawing them. Never used anything other than the character creator, and it's kind of a shame they had to shut down, and it's kind of scary thinking about the circumstances that lead them to such a sudden cease of operations. Nice vid as always btw.

I agree that pressure from IP protection is most likely the reason for their shut down, does not even have to be monetary, could as well just be them no longer wanting to deal with having to defend themselves considering the differences in laws between USA and Japan in terms of having to protect your IP. Thank you for the info on this situation, saw the twitter post, but it made me think it was only shutting down sales outside Japan.

If we look at it optimistically, they might rebrand and go back again with different name.