>>8470722For starters, it should be worth noting that people already knows what VNs are. At least people already interested in anime.
as it is today, its sort of hard to avoid VNs being mentioned in almost any anime community, especially given the many adaptations that have been made.
So there is already a level of awareness, although arguably not as big as it could be etc etc, though it is still on a completely other level than compared to say, 10 years ago.
But almost nothing of this matters when point still stands that Japanese developers are notably wary of piracy. Japan already has a self sustained economy, and most of all of them are doing all of what they can to get good success at that market locally.
To expand can for one thing seem unnecessary for many given they already have their hands full locally, but it can also seem very inappropriate if they if they feel they already have a tough time to expand locally.
There are a ton of new laws one have to account to when one opens oneself up internationally, and as with business deals in general, tons of things that can go wrong and things that have to be sealed up with as fool proof as possible contracts as possible. And with that taken into account, if things are to be done officially, people generally tend to feel far more at ease making deals with people with a revenue capable of being held responsible if things hits the fan.
The biggest publishers for VNs in the west are JAST and Mangagamer.
One thing of note though in terms of the comparison with anime, is that there have always been tons of TV-Networks and similar businesses in the west. These are the ones that tried to check out anime, and these were already relatively big.
