Also not to continue on about this whole debacle, but this just makes me realize how the Western otome community has to prove their interest to each individual company. Like it took people not shutting up about Hakuouki's localization and continuing to support it for Aksys to eventually pick up other titles years later (also maybe Sweet Fuse didn't do well which made the hesitant to pick another one up, it's hard to say). Then Idea Factory put out Amnesia: Memories since people kept asking for that one and then again, it wouldn't be until years later and probably because of the continuous support shown to that game where Idea Factory decided to give us more titles last year.
People were spamming PQube with Jack Jeanne as one of their major wishlist titles, and I'm sure that's what made Broccoli move ahead and decide to finally localize a game (still surprised Aksys got this because of this). I'm not entirely clear on the circumstances of Bustafellows localization, but I wouldn't be surprised if it followed a similar pattern.
And now here we are with Ruby Party titles. If I'm understanding correctly, even the employees in the US branch have been trying to push for these games to come to the West since like 2018, but they haven't budged. And now they're asking, again, for the Western otome community to prove themselves and like? It's exhausting. I get Japanese companies (even outside of otome titles) have always been resistant to localizing their titles to the West, but I've been watching this go on since we got Hakuouki in 2013 and it's just...exhausting it's been almost a decade of this at this point. Especially since the otome community has grown to a pretty decent size at this point. I don't know, I normally don't like to rant, but it's just wild how consistent this pattern is.