How do niche Japanese games manage to sustain themselves when most of them hardly reach 100K in sales?

How do niche Japanese games manage to sustain themselves when most of them hardly reach 100K in sales?
Is it some kind of nip budget magic?

When you're a small company that's putting their games on portable systems or just trying to focus on selling your game in ways other than graphics, it's amazing how low the budget becomes compared to bigger titles.

>Nip budget magic
You don't have to develop any gameplay, you save costs on modeling/textures for characters because they all look exactly the same minus clothing/hair changes, graphics in general just need to look PS2 era, and you save costs on marketing because weeaboos will shriek autismally a screenshot of tits emerges.

Devs don't eat.

They are made cheap and nasty for not much money, throw together some cute official artwork for the girl characters, then make bank on toys, statues, fuck holes etc

their budget isn't very high to begin with. just look at neptunia games. models look like they belong on a handheld, the gameplay is barebones, almost no marketing besides social media and Sup Forums, most of the effort goes towards designing 2d art pictures and voice actors.

Don't use AAA marketing and graphics like a dumbass and budget stops being an issue.

Small team + small budget + slave-tier workers = small dev costs
Add waifubait for extra income

>small budget
>keep games expensive, $40+ rarely go on sale
>costume DLC
Basically they know they aren't going to sell well so they price gouge the people who do buy them.

Are you retarded.

>actuall gameplay is some low quality pixel art
>gameplay completly removed and replaced with just few images + options
hmm... maybe because their """games""" are shit.

they're niche games for a reason. the niche that they appeal to are very dedicated fans that support the content creators.

look at anime, for example. most anime is readily available without needing to be paid for. anime and manga creators get money by selling their manga, selling DVD and blu-ray copies of the anime, selling figures, posters, etc.

The japanese are just magical. Like, I don't know how Nintendo does it either considering their games tend to be in development for a long time and never sell a fuck ton. Whereas, western games have like a 200 million budget (How?) for a yearly series

No need for AAA visuals severely deflate the budget, more importantly, no massive advertisement campaigns, these are the two biggest money sinks in game development.

Look at some trash like FFXV, costed billions to make and has gameplay worse than a fucking Musou game, where do you think all the money went?

Name three (3) games that do this.

This is my wife.

Japs barely get paid anything, and they also outsource to China/Korea (like everyone else).
They also didn't fall for the meme of paying their VA's a cajillion dollars to say some lines for 4 hours, which means they can sustain themselves on "low" sales.

Nintendo pays development costs with console sales, plus they reutilize a lot of assets from previous games and levels. BotW for example is one of their biggest game (23GB) and the cutscenes and dubs are what took most space.

...

FOUR
FOOT
ELEVEN

Senran Kagura has been reusing assets since 2013. Even after moving to PS4 they are still using VITA models.

Hate to break it to you, but that's a male lion.

>Implying curvy dickgirls isn't my fetish

>never sell a fuck ton
they have more multi million selling franchises than any other publisher in the industry

>Answers his question in his own post with an image
Okay.. is this some new dank Sup Forums meme?

Never underestimate the power of otaku with money