That's the point. There's no credit for you to take in the first place. The credit goes to the artist that drew the pictures, not to the people who ripped them out of the game. I always thought you guys where doing this to broaden the audience ... to draw more people to the game ...
Wait, you guys are making money of it? I thought you did it for the good of the western community, to improve interest in this and maybe get them released there later on - basically what fansubs of anime did to a big part of the industry 20 years ago, when almost no one knew what anime was ...
Chances someone is going to pick off from where you left off are pretty high though. Wouldn't count on anything changing in the long run if you guys stop. Especially if money is involved.
You do have a point. Can't argue that the credit goes to the artist and the game studio.
But the very least the CG ripper get a little credit for doing the work of ripping it.
I could say that exhentai shouldn't really exist based on this. We would prefer nothing get posted to exhentai, but it isn't our choice.
There wouldn't be any serious uploaders around if there is no money, that is the reality now.
Well, I thought you would have known this. Otherwise, why would the same game get posted like 20 times within the same period, all with the same file hosters?
If you do not want to be involved in these "earnings", you can always download from Bittorrent.
May be someone will buy 1-2 titles because they like the game, and most of the non-big-title will get left off.
And it happens that our forum (not AS) have many of these people who will buy 1-2 titles EACH (and we do deputy service, plus a rebate for them) so we can offer 20+ titles a month
It is unlikely that someone will pick it up if we stop, because
1. The Japanese will worry that they get caught.
2. It will not be economically viable for any of the uploaders here to buy and release, not to mention it get copied within 30 minutes.
3. If the game comes with some serious protection, these uploaders can't crack the game.
If you want to compare it to fansubs, these fansubs had a website with a donation button, to pay for XDCC servers.
Just that now Paypal doesn't allow this, so everyone has moved on to file hoster with earnings.
Anyway, thanks for reading. I do not intent to argue with you, but just to show a picture of how eroge release is currently.