During this past weekend’s Kumoricon event, Sol Press announced Project Hyourin, a digital distribution platform for light novels, visual novels, and manga. They stated that this platform has been in development for the past six months and will launch in, roughly, two weeks. This would put the laugh somewhere in mid-November.
Sol Press did announce some of the titles they plan on having on the service which includes the following:
Novels
- Why Shouldn’t a Detestable Demon Lord Fall in Love?!
- Redefining the Meta at VRMMO Academy
Visual Novels
- Irotoridori no Sekai
- Under One Wing
- The Future Radio and the Artificial Pigeons
In addition, Sol Press announced that there will be a host of new visual novels coming to Steam, each of which will be free and will have subsequent 18+ patches for their mature content. Those titles include the following:
- Love Among the Sunflowers
- My Fair Princess
- Choose Your Mistress
- Nukitashi
- Oni-chan, Where’s My Kiss?
Sol Press stated that at launch, they plan to distribute their own titles at first but stressed that anyone would be allowed to distribute over the platform. Sol Press compared their platform similar to Steam in terms of what it will allow on the service so things such as content, maturity rating, etc will all be taken into account. The project will focus on anime-style content but didn’t rule out any type of future content genres.
While there is no mobile app for the service planned for launch, Sol Press stated that one is in the works and will be available at some point in the future. The app will have manga and light novels available to their readers but not visual novels… yet. They wish to make visual novels available on mobile; however, they need to work with developers in order to integrate their games into the mobile platform, ensuring that the games can run on iOS or Andriod. In other words, any title they release, they would have to make two extra ports of it and that takes time and resources. They didn’t rule out the possibility but it’s something that shouldn’t be expected in the immediate future.
Sol Press’ last announcement stated that they are partnering with Japanese publisher Entergram in order to bring console ports of visual novels to the West!
Sol Press started in February of 2017 as a new light novel, visual novel, and manga publisher.
