Yesterday I saw it mentioned Visual-Novels.net, with ANN reporting it a day later: Hirameki is gone. The message at their website says: "Hirameki International Group, Inc. has decided to bow out of publishing Interactive Visual Novels as of January 2, 2008."

Coincidently, Hourglass of Summer was the centerpiece of the loot I received at the same day. I already played a little, and it was pretty bad on the technical side. It was readily apparent that DVD has no performance to do what the game designers wanted to do. The inhabitants of #animedvd suggested that the reason for this is that Hirameki ported the game from PC to DVD. Thus, sprite motion, which PC can do easily, is choppy at DVD. In the same time, the game has virtually no animation. Presumably, a game authored for DVD from the start would deliver a more satisfactory experience.

If Hourglass is a flagship title for DVD, I'm not surprised that it never sold. This does not explain why Hirameki died, because I presume most sales came from PC games, free of the aforementioned problems.

UPDATE: Heisei Democracy:

Despite the official closure of Hirameki’s doors many of their titles are still available for purchase, including the critically acclaimed Ever17 and Phantom of Inferno.

No Hourglass? Evidently I selected the worst title. Unfortunatley, Phantom is action, so...