# The Novelpia Global Launch Disaster Novelpia Global's 2025 launch is a masterclass in corporate incompetence. Despite substantial backing and years of domestic success, the Korean web novel platform has managed to alienate Western readers through a combination of legal aggression and technical failures that would be comical if they weren't so destructive. ## DMCA Blitzkrieg: Destroying Your Own Market Novelpia's first brilliant move was launching over 1000 DMCA takedowns against fan translations that had spent years cultivating Western interest in Korean novels. These weren't competitors—they were unpaid marketing departments building audiences for content Novelpia wanted to monetize. By nuking fan translation sites, they didn't eliminate competition; they eliminated the very community that made the Western market viable. The timing was spectacular in its tone-deafness: declaring war on your future customers while simultaneously trying to court them. Nothing says "we value our community" like legal threats. ## Translation Quality: How to Waste Millions Even worse than their legal warfare was their translation quality. Despite having significant resources, Novelpia somehow produced translations objectively worse than MTL slop from sites like darkstarTL—a feat that should be mathematically impossible for a well-funded company. Their translations read like broken Google Translate from 2010. In an era where AI translation tools are sophisticated and accessible, Novelpia's output demonstrates fundamental incompetence in both source and target languages. Fan sites using free tools were producing superior results than a multi-million dollar company's official release. ## The Hugging Face Oversight: When Money Can't Buy Sense The most damning revelation is that Novelpia apparently never explored modern AI translation solutions. Hugging Face hosts numerous sophisticated translation models that could have been implemented for the cost of basic cloud inference—pocket change for a company with their resources. How do you have millions in funding but fail to invest even "peanuts" in proper translation infrastructure? This isn't just quality control failure—it's strategic incompetence revealing deeper organizational problems. ## The Missed Opportunity Novelpia had everything needed for success: proven content, financial backing, a hungry Western market, and access to cutting-edge AI translation technology. Instead, they chose to attack their own community while delivering inferior products. ## Conclusion The Novelpia Global launch will be remembered as one of publishing's most spectacular failures. It's a case study in how corporate arrogance, technical incompetence, and strategic myopia can turn guaranteed success into disaster. For other publishers eyeing Western expansion, Novelpia has provided the perfect blueprint of what not to do.
I hope they just close it down and go back to Korea and stay there. They clearly aren't wanted here, and by now even they in their infinite ignorance should recognize this fact. Just let us have our decent to outstanding fan translations and take your shitty mtl back where it belongs.
Looks like they went for the "MTL a bunch of series" approach. To be honest, even if DMCAing a bunch of fan translators makes people who follow the community annoyed, I think people would have forgiven them very quickly if they had launched well, or even if they had launched with a bunch of machine-translated novels but had a public plan to get real translations later. But people aren't going to pay for MTL. Hopefully they will pivot and realize they need to present at least translations that aren't obviously MTL in order to get anyone to subscribe. But I don't have high expectations; it seems more likely that whoever was in charge of this initiative will conclude that the Western audience doesn't have enough interest to sustain the site and either let it limp along or cancel it.
Some idiot thought to purposefully mistranslated spearman as lancer. Every competent machine/AI translation I know translates 창술사가 as spearman. They didn't even bother changing their chapter title or description which uses spear in it. The price is okay for now but knowing how companies think, they'll raise the prices once they reach a certain number of works or viewers. Personally I would have mostly supported them if their machine translations were on par with fan machine translations. At least they aren't paywalling per chapter compared to some fan translators who would want me to pay $1 per chapter to read their translations spewed by AI. Would rather have a flat fee to read anything and everything than that, but this ain't it chief.
lol I also saw "I Became the Pink-Haired Extra in a Yuri Novel" and thought, based on the name, that it was another, unrelated story about being reborn as a pink-haired extra in a yuri story. the novelpia formula is very, uh, powerful