Note sure where to place this and maybe this is already known so I'll simply place this here....Maybe you guys new since Moon Angel caused Konami to update their site?

http://www.konami-data.com/officialsites/BusouShinki/

404 domain error. The English site has been pulled so I'll take this as a middle finger to the English speaking community directly from Konami. Wow.....Wonder if it was something I said or if they just dislike North Americans in general for the licking of the fish, Americans robbing taxi drivers, and the like....From a business standpoint they could of simply released Battlemasters as a digital download on PSN if they wanted to reach us foreigners.

Been told that Konami once had an American Konami store somewhere in America yet it got pulled, then this. All the stores (retail & online) are struggling to stock Shinki's. I'm curious to know if Konami actually cares or half-assingly just going with it. Hmm...

Ouch.........

Edit: Maybe I was a bit too harsh, but this took me by surprise so it's only natural.

FFFFFFFFFF~!! Why, Konami, WHY~!!??

I doubt there was any malice involved, just a simple business decision - they're not making any effort to appeal directly to the English-speaking market any more (and even when they did, it was pretty half-assed), and I highly doubt that the page gets much traffic, so it simply wasn't worth maintaining.

In fact, a quick look at the site via the wayback machine seems to indicate that it was never really updated anyway, unless there was something in the now-broken flash object more recent than the two updates dating back to 2007 that are the only other visible content... also it seems to have been a 404 as far back as July at least, and no-one noticed until now, which probably says something about its relevance.

Maybe I did word that harshly, but ya, noted.

When I was keeping tabs on it I noticed the site keeping up-to-date with the new Shinki releases. It added Rapitas and her wave sister. After that, I couldn't tell if it was updated or not because everybody was mostly bouncing around the Japanese sites.

also it seems to have been a 404 as far back as July at least, and no-one noticed until now, which probably says something about its relevance.

Hmm.....Maybe, maybe not. Cat is our news person and s/he tends to spot things swiftly. We also have very observant people so I doubt it is that. Or maybe we truly don't care about Shinki's as we let on?

just remember their target market is inside Japan, not outside of it

Wow, that stinks.

If only Konami knew just how many of us North Americans are into Busou Shinki. I know they're targeting the Shinki market right in Japan, but still...

I think I'm most surprised that they bothered to unplug the site. I don't think they've done any official business with the brand outside of Japan since Diamond gave up carrying them.

TRANS+CRAZY wrote:If only Konami knew just how many of us North Americans are into Busou Shinki.

Assuming they don't know, we're still pretty much talking about the population of this message board. (Bearing in mind that some North American Shinki fans/enthusiasts aren't members here, but also that a substantial portion of the members here aren't North American, either.) It's not really enough people to justify the business venture.

Not to rain on anybody's parade, mind you, but it's important to keep perspective on these things. Japanese companies do have some ... curious decision-making strategies, from time to time, but there can't be a lot of money in selling figures to a group of less than a thousand people. Especially when we've all shown that we're already willing to import (either directly or indirectly) through a third party, anyway.

" we're still pretty much talking about the population of this message board. "

assumes, quite egotistically, that all non-japanese shinkifans lurk here. to say nothing of the anonymii on /toy/, there's bound to be plenty who don't feel much drive to join a community bout it.

Don't forget that there are lots of fans that don't sit on forums or boards.

You guys are thinking too hard about a guesstimative about how few the non-Japanese-speaking Shinki fans are.