The original game will receive an English release

It will grow in popularity in the start and we will probably get a lot of new people that watch the anime. I am however expecting the game to die down in a couple of months, especially if they do a fully separate English version and doesn't just add English translations to the current JP version. The early game modes aren't really that fun to play, especially you MANT, so I fear a lot of players will not have the willpower to grind through it

The English version will be apparently 3-4 years behind the JP version, so people thinking this will make a big global profit are fooling themselves. And Cygames generally has poor handling of global release versions of their gacha's. That's not including the fact horse racing as a sport isn't as popular in the world as it once was, in Japan, it is still immensely popular, hence it's success there. IIRC they tried a version in China, but it was failure.

@Tropisch But Princess Connect was quite popular and a lot of people were upset when Crunchyroll dropped it

@RobertBobert That's pretty much the case for anything CR get's to be the publisher of. The thing I mentioned of the English version of this apparently being behind by a massive gap is just one example of Cy not being a great publisher either.

@Tropisch And how do you propose to solve this?

@RobertBobert No idea how they'd do it. I'm honestly stumped on how they'd make it more appealing in terms of being so far behind. The fact they used DMM certainly doesn't help, which is an extremely awful site since they'll ban people who have IP's outside of Japan for playing the game on there.

@Tropisch Is this all due to the paranoia of horse rights owners as usual?

@RobertBobert I'd say it's at least a possibility, one of the characters only got into the game after being originally planned from the start just recently, Ofevre I think. It'll be a rather complex thing to see how that works though in the English version, the owners could at any time say they revoke Cy's right to have their horse namesake in the game.

@Tropisch I just remembered the infamous doujin ban story and what an adventure it could be trying to play Blue Archive and UC Engage outside of the US.

@RobertBobert That's why I'm skeptical of how long this'll last, IIRC, Cy's people can send people dmca's too, and last year they opened NA and EU offices.

@Tropisch But is it really that difficult? Azur Lane, Bandori/Love Live or Genshin gives literally anyone the opportunity to get acquainted with their franchise.

@RobertBobert The marketing for this one was just them opening a new English YT channel and saying it's announced, the rights probably made it hard to make any kind of announcement with copyrighted characters. They could do more closer to it's actual release date, but I don't think Cy has really ever done a huge amount of marketing for their stuff in general. Heck, until I saw it here and looked at the gacha Reddit, I didn't even know it was getting this version.

@Tropisch Well, as I wrote above, until recently I actually thought that they already had an English version. And I even searched hopelessly for it on Google Play, lmao. Eh, I never thought that playing Granblue Fantasy would be even more difficult than Uma Musume for me.

@RobertBobert Yeah, unfortunately no release date so far. And yeah, I feel you on the GBF, I made an account a few months ago on it and I have to sign into 3 different sites just to start it.

@Tropisch Does GBF really have such strict restrictions on players outside the US?

@RobertBobert Compared to other stuff from Cy, no, but you need an account on Japanese sites which is confusing, thankfully those sites don't ban you like DMM does. It has an English option built into the game.

Hopefully they won't lewd the umas

@TMK1k Sorry dude, but you're late. IMAS has long been a place for people who have never played the game but create ships and character fanfiction based on fan memes and random translated commu on YouTube. At best, watching anime.