I can actually answer the Empress question personally knowing Sei from way back in 1997, who the company was basically founded by after he left Active-soft due to conflicts during the Discipline development and following anime OVA rights sale. Basically yes they looked to make some easy money from DMM and people paid make no mistake, but more importantly its just easier for him to produce wall scrolls, pillow covers or the odd new piece of artwork for DMM game - mostly because he's older now. I believe he's in his forties and at this stage producing eroge games is very much a hobby and its easier to make money/produce a few new pieces of artwork for various things then to make a full blown game every 6 months, plus his games are well documented for delays too due to story and art issues.
Discipline for example was shipped before it was even finished and required a patch to implement another ending because the company needed to ship it for various reasons. I haven't talked to him for ages now, but I wouldn't be surprised if they started working on a new concept for a game - a few times and scrapped it, or keep changing aspects. Basically development hell.
Its funny how many people recommend the Discipline anime/ova and how popular it is, it was one of the first blu-ray hentai releases too! Yet Sei hated it with every fiber of his body, his stories are about dark themes entangle with tragic romance and the OVA basically turned "dark" into the supernatural school club as a comedy hentai. Then after he left active-soft they kept rebranding themselves (I believe it was like 2 people at this point and its assets resold or something) then Kitty Media/Media blasters became involved in translating the games.
I actually remember emailing Media Blasters president John Sirabella by Sei's request because they changed a bunch of names such as Reona to Leona. John was a total ass and ignored Sei's request because he thought Leona sounded stronger in english like a "lioness" then Reona which he claimed was Sei not properly translating english but it was a play off words with her sister Reina > Reona. Honestly John was a total asshole in his emails to me and Sei, he thought he knew better and totally disrespected artistic expression for his own ego bullshit that he knew better.
You'd think the bullshit would stop there but when the wiki-page was made around the anime/game Sei actually changed the name of Leona to Reona on it AS his expressed name of her as the creator using a linked character sketch reference as its creator with her name penned "reona". Fucking John went in and changed it back using bad translating as reason. WTF right. It went back and forth for a while, eventually we just said fuck it. I'm not sure why Leona stuck as her name in the english dubbed anime, but he made it his mission to piss all over Sei and change her name to Leona wherever he could. They even removed the original game plot and put up the anime's plot for wikipedia - which again Sei completely hated. Completely despised. They literally shit all over his creation from one end to the other. For a while there was a note saying names might differ based on region or something official but even thats gone now or mentioned that the plots between the game and anime are totally different.
Now younger fans of eroge have never seen Sei's artwork or played what is basically games from nearly 20 years ago. Even Bible Black is a thing of the past now.
So the whole Discipline thing is truly a mess from start to finish, which is too bad because Sei actually had a really cool idea for a sequel that took place on...ok its been forever but if I recall it was a riding ranch/school thing owned by the sisters family (like the school was from Discipline) where a bunch of rich girls go. Reona's younger sister was going to be the your love interest who wasn't like her sisters (who would only make cameos), but per tragic circumstances gets punished throughout the story to make her more like them, ect. There was to be a LOT of bestiality in it and stuff.
All of that got cancelled and Sei had never shared this idea at Active-soft before he left since the first game was still fresh and the issues around it hot. Following that it left such a bad taste in Sei's mouth from what happened at Active-soft, he dropped the whole story idea. I still wish he would have re-visited the idea in some way, even as a kind of easter egg thing alluding to Discipline (but maybe the sisters never appear or something) but it will never happen because of everything around it.
LOL or funny shit could happen and somebody he knows could be reading this, say hey a guy on this website posted he knows you and mentioned something about Discipline 2. At which point I get an email from him asking if I still have all the original emails we shared about it, although he wouldnt' know me by tentacle bandit. I used to go by a very different name back in the glory days of the internets but its still active as my yahoo.co.jp account.
