Well that didn’t take long, didn’t it?

Before anyone jumps in to say “we told you so,” we need to clarify a few things about why we initially decided to announce the project early:

1. We didn’t make the announcement without doing due diligence beforehand. We felt safe about not receiving a letter for multiple reasons I won’t go at length about. 
2. We wanted to confirm that we would indeed not be targeted before placing a titanic amount of effort in the project, since we respect the company and their desire to monetize their IPs.

Though this feels like an “obvious” conclusion to this chain of events, we would like to reiterate that we were given ample reason to believe that this translation attempt would be left untouched.

While we still stand by the point that the games won’t be worked on in the near future, we would love nothing more than to see SM be released within 2023 by the company. We wish them all the best if that is indeed their plan.

We never wished to harm the company with our work, or to compete with them in any capacity. We just like their games.

I personally was in the middle of collaborating with other fan translation teams to complete some of the old aNCHOR’s fan disks from KimiNozo, but seeing that aNCHOR is keen on maintaining the integrity of their IPs, I’ve decided to end my involvement in these projects as well, since they might want to eventually work on these fan disks at some point in time. I apologize to those I was working with in these small-scale projects.

That’s pretty much everything. Thank you to those who were positive with us throughout this whole process, and see you around hopefully soon with other stuff that will definitely not receive legal notifications.

TLDR: Schwarzesmarken is dropped. We contacted a few parties who informed us that fan translations were allowed previously, but due to changes in the company policy none of us were aware of; it seems that those assumptions were no longer true. Thus upon getting the message from aNCHOR, we decided to respect their request and will cease all work, as we clearly stated in the announcement post.

—Daybreak Translations