Re: Kimochi shutting down
I'd actually disagree that the market is too small. I think there is enough of a market for adult games etc. to keep a platform up - I just think that Kimochi made quite a lot of misteps. Here's a bullet list:
- Hosting: They were using DigitalOcean for hosting; looking at the pricing DigitalOcean has, it seems fairly steep. Especially once you get into high-bandwidth territory.
- Free Content: They were hosting free content and absorbing the bandwidth costs without any solid monetisation strategy; would have been much better to get monetisation sorted first, and possibly leverage other platforms for storage of free content (e.g. having their client use Mega for storage of free games).
- Branding: They marketed themselves as being a Western adult game market, but called themselves Kimochi - a Japanse word. Not the smartest branding, frankly.
- Restricted Content: They limited themselves just to adult games, which are pretty niche. It would have made a lot of sense to host other adult stuff like comics, animations, stories etc. There's a few western groups/collectives that stay afloat doing just comics (thinking mainly of Slipshine/Hentaikey, probably others)
- Restricted Platforms: Sort-of tieing into the previous point, the client put up a pretty big barrier. Even though there are a lot of shopfronts that require a client to use their content (Steam, UPlay, Origin, whatever), I can't think of one that required the client to browse the catalogue.
- Exclusivity: There was nothing exclusive to the platform, I think. And even if there was, there was no advertisement of that due to the problem of not being able to view the catalogue outside of the client. Getting something exclusive would've driven a lot of interest.
There are more misteps, I'd say, but these were the major ones.
