Littlewitch Ceases Operation Indefinitely

Continuing the trend of reporting old news, Littlewitch announced last December that they're closing up shop "indefinitely" after their latest game, Sugar Coat Freaks, is released on January 29th. The main reason for the sudden announcement, as with most eroge brands that end up getting shut down, is due to economic hardship.

For those not familiar with Littlewitch, it's an eroge company founded in 2001. What makes Littlewitch awesome is Ooyari Ashito, whose unique art style became one of the biggest selling points of Littlewitch's games. When Littlewitch released Shirotsumesouwa -Episode of the Clovers- in 2002, it turned quite a few heads and put the company on the map. The company followed up with Quartett! in 2004, which was highly praised and sold even better.

Unfortunately, magic didn't strike a third time, after the first two successes, Littlewitch's games have been gradually going downhill in terms of story and art, although Rondo Leaflet, Period, and Shoujo Mahou Gakuen Littlewitch Romanesque weren't bad by any means, they failed to match Littlewitch's first two games in terms of quality or success.

Taking a look at the following sales diagram made by this blog which conveniently went offline as of this writing, it becomes pretty obvious what's the problem:

For the sake of completeness, here's Zepy's translation of the message posted on Littlewitch's site:

We still wish to continue making more games, but it has become apparent that if we continue like this and start developing the next game, we will start having trouble with funding before we can release the game, causing trouble to a lot of people, so we have come to the decision that we would have to draw the line here for now.

As I look back now, it has been a continuous series of obstacles after obstacles all the way from when we first set up Little Witch. Even so, the reason why we managed to make it this far is thanks to all the support from our fans. And the only thing that hasn’t changed all this time is my motivation to want to create new games. Even now, I’m still thinking of how we can make better games and how we can “continue” to make games.

I hope to be able to find a workable framework with sustainable development and growth.

I give my sincerest thanks to all the fans who have supported Little Witch for the past 9 years.

We’re giving our fullest right now on the final touch ups for Sugar Coat Freaks which is currently in development. We’re doing the final adjustments now to ensure we can deliver an even better product.

Little Witch representative
Ooyari Ashito
17th December 2009

Even though the post mentions the company has been put on hold indefinitely, it looks like it's not coming back any time soon... but then again, if NekoNeko Soft can make a comeback, perhaps Littlewitch can as well? Here's hoping!