Everyone rejoice! Hatoful Boyfriend is coming to Steam with official, and hopefully proofread, English subtitles sometime in August of 2014 on Steam. Maybe if the game sells well enough an "official" English release of Paca Plus will be announced. In the meantime of both of these hotly anticipated releases, I advise you to satiate your excitement by dating the President of "New Japan."

In all seriousness here's to hoping that games from all genres and geographic regions can be distributed in the United States and elsewhere on digital platforms like Steam.

It is important to realize that Hatoful Boyfriend was originally created as a parody of how stupid and inane romance visual novels could be, and how oddly specific VN fans can be about their subject material. However, the developer of the game didn't anticipate that the game would become so incredibly popular with the exact fanbase that they were trying to insult. So now the developers are stuck making more games of this ilk (first birds, then alpacas, and now bug people), because it makes them good money and their publisher wants them to. Will this commentary be included, or will it be whitewashed in this release? Only time will tell....

The lesson here is that the fans are more self-aware than the developer apparently gave them credit for.

In all seriousness, it's cool to see this game getting a domestic release through Steam. Still waiting on a Princess Arthur localization, though.

The thought of an alpaca dating sim makes me happy.

SOMEBODY NOTIFY O'DWYER IMMEDIATELY!

This makes me uncomfortable.

How about this?

Hunh. Yeah okay, I'll play this.

@dannyodwyer you once mentioned in Giant Bomb chat during your E3 interviews something along the likes of "pigeon boyfriends > Hatsune Miku," ARE YOU READY TO PAY THE PIPER?!

Once this comes West, you're kind of obligated to play Hatoful Boyfriend on a stream now!

Will there be a $100+ super special collectors edition available?

Oh they made a sequel BUT...

It is a Christmas themed "DLC/expansion pack" parody of a common business strategy employed by Visual Novel companies. Oftentimes once a Visual Novel has been proven to be financially viable the publisher will commission the developer to make character specific "endings" where you essentially buy DLC to have the "true end" for a single character or romance option. Did you like all of the characters/romance options? Too bad; they only sell these character specific endings at $4-5 a pop. The worse part is that these will oftentimes be advertised as the "ultimate ending," but it amounts to nothing more than a virtual date. So the Hatoful Boyfriend sequel is nothing more than asking one of the pigeons out on a date during Christmas and eating cake with them. It's a big 'eff you, and it's awesome.

Think of the Christmas scene during Persona 4, but that's the entire game.

Some of this didn't really need to be in spoiler tags. Like the parts describing how crazy the VN industry is over there by straight-up selling endings, I didn't know they were that bad about it! Kinda cruel!

EDIT: Weird, the WYSYWIG editor broke the spoiler tag in quotes, here.

@zombiepie: Hah! That's pretty good. Sounds similar to the way that last Mass Effect 3 DLC was advertised.

I don't understand video games anymore.

I'm down with dating pigeons.

Like this but more romantic:

Now on the Humble Dating Sim Bundle that dropped this week.

You'll like the games, but won't tell anyone.