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In answering the thread's question, I think it could work given a very good licensing arrangement with the original producer. To be honest, I've gotten the idea from some things I've heard (such as Key's million dollar 'fuck you' to the collective English localisation market) that some Japanese companies just don't get that visual novels aren't going to sell very well at all overseas. If we could get an arrangement where the original producer agrees to only take 20% or so of the net profit from sales, I think with popular titles it would be very possible to break even. First of all, I think we should discard the notion of un-mosaicing the CGs. We don't need that, nobody needs that, and it only costs more time and money. Then, given a fairly lightweight translation team (maybe just a couple of people, working full-time) and cheap distribution methods (online would do) it could be doable. Games with successful anime adaptations will already have a bit of an overseas following, so those should be targeted first. It would be interesting to see if it could work out. However, the licensing arrangement would have to be very good. Logically, VN companies should have no problem with this (they aren't going to be making money out of the overseas market anyway, for the most part) but, from what I've seen, this isn't necessarily the case.
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