English Hatsune Miku + Vocaloid Store Plans

[oftendistracted]

Those of you on Facebook, take heed - At the New York Comic Con, Crypton are trying to get an idea for the demand for Vocaloids in US territories, and have asked people on Facebook to go friend Miku's page on the proviso that if she gets 39,390 friends on it they'll go and give her an English-speaking release. They've also mentioned looking into

Comments

[shinaka]

Thanks for the credit (and I'm really sorry for not speaking up about it in the IRC channel earlier but wow, the con really burnt me out x.x

[oftendistracted]

No worries on both counts!

That friend count thing might be an 'if' rather than a 'when' - it's been stalled at 13k for a couple days now. Fortunately, they make it sound like the store is separate to EngloidMiku so we might get it regardless. I was pretty much thinking they could pair up with Kinokuniya, yeah, because they've already got experience selling this stuff in a Western market.

[shinaka]

The article said they started out with 12,102 friends. As of 3 pm (central) monday, miku has 15, 143 friends.

[oftendistracted]

Yeah. I expect it's gone up today as it's the first weekday / the first day that people at the con would have gotten home and to their own computers. Even then, it was only up 1,000 friends on Sunday. That's... substantially less of an early rush than I would have expected.

[shinaka]

I think that's mostly because it was a panel that most expected would just be a rehash of the concept of Vocaloid to an intrigued audience who mostly didn't know about Miku by the creators themselves. There were die-hard fans definitely, who wanted the chance to see the co-creators, but I did notice a good bunch of people in the panel who were just really getting to know about Miku and Vocaloid for the first time (and good thing, too, - I'm so, SO sick of people asking if Miku's part of an anime >.<). The news at the end, then, most certainly came out of nowhere for almost everybody (me included XD), and the fact that some small news site like my friend's leetNEET (no offense to him XD) got first scoop rather than some bigger organization like VocaloidOtaku indicates that not even press considered the panel to have much news value.

Also, the lackluster early rush might be attributed to leetNEET's lack of status and name recognition... >.>

[shinaka]

It seems like the stalling has finally stopped - the number's mushroomed to 17,000 now! :D But yeah, the friending thing is gonna be a continual uphill battle; especially when we run out of Vocaloid fans who are also on facebook... x.x

If I find out more news about the store, I'm posting it up first thing!~