Re: On Lord of Valkyrie and Games Closing Down.
Not surprising. When I registered, Nutaku had LoV and MWA (and that two luv games nobody wants to talk about). I tried both and frankly, the only reason why I kept playing LoV for a long time was because there wasn't anything else on Nutaku. Once the site started to have more games that I could keep playing, LoV was the first I dropped.
It's slow, yet requires constant activity (because of bossfights). The incredibly tedious levelling system was bad and when I hit the point where even my gift list was full and would had to drop money on the game to expand my card limit, I actually stopped for a minute and asked myself: Do I really enjoy this or am I just playing because it became a habit? The answer was the latter, so I just dropped it.
Sure, the translation probably didn't help either, but other games have terrible translation as well and they still flourish. Best example is Dragon Providence. That game is borderline unintelligible at places, with some texts left in Japanese, yet it's one of the most trending games. Another issue is that far eastern gamers seem to have a much higher tolerance for repetitive grinding mechanics, which are the core of LoV.
Of course none of this will make any LoV players feel any better. It sucks when a F2P game that you've put so much time and effort in just closes, I've been there. But hey, eventually Nutaku had to start closing down their less successful games. That's part of the business. Although, this isn't the first game they got rid of. That godawful Luv Bingo game that nobody ever played also disappeared from their list of games at some point.
Which kinda makes me wonder how come that LoV is losing money for them, yet Luv Slot isn't. That thing was a barren wasteland like half a year ago.
I'd say their games featuring real porn instead of hentai are going to be next.
In the long run (so, like a year or more down the line) I don't think that Duel Squad, Girls Kingdom or Angelic Saga will last. Duel Squad is an uninspired clone of Dragon Tactics, and the latter probably isn't doing all that awesomely if they have to run a "please come back playing this game, we even give you gifts" campaign.
Angelic Saga is quite time consuming with a horrible netcode (at least it was horrible when I played it). And considering that the JP version closed down months ago, Nutaku will run out of events in the long run and I doubt the game would be so popular as to make it worth to invest money in making new, Nutaku exclusive content for it.
As for Girls Kingdom, as much as I like it, I can see the issues. Again, not so good coding, so it runs like ass in most browsers, requires a lot of time to be at the top, but not demanding to just stay in. This, combined with the fact that it has very long events, makes it a secondary games for most. Which isn't a great position to be in when you actually want to make money. Considering that they started to sell out premium gacha units essentially for peanuts (considering your chances of getting them from actual gacha spin at least) is probably not a good sign.
