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How very true

This is something I've posted on Reddit earlier, but I thought I might as well spread the awareness of Valve's BS here too. After a month of keeping the release build in review (SSS was made by Sunrider's developers, Love in Space and is published by Sekai), Valve said that it will not let the game on the platform (even though it seems to have a proper all-ages version and an adult patch, just like Maitetsu, released at the same time by the same publisher) until their new filtering tool, basically the way to make the waifu games invisible for those that are scared of them, are implemented. The problem is, they don't give even an approximate of when that might be. The tools might arrive next week, or next year and devs that put the work and marketing towards their releases this summer might get stuck in limbo for who-knows-how-long. I guess long, because the tools will most likely go live as beta feature and stay like that for a while before they're fully implemented. It seems that SolPress' Newrin is in the same situation, although that company didn't invest their last two year into this one project and can probably live with an indefinite delay. All in all, Valve is a f***** shitty company as always, I at least hope they won't wait another year to implement those filtering tools and that they'll actually make them useful. Then they can go back to not caring what people what people upload on their storefront - that way they'll at least not actively screw over decent developers.

I'll just mention the chronology along with a short description. All of these works take place in the nasuverse, though they largely follow independent timelines. 1. Kara no Kyoukai - Gives a interesting background information about the nasuverse. Nasu's first VN Tsukihime is loosely based on this. This was originally a light novel series, later adapted into an anime movie series by ufotable. 2. The Visual Novel Series following the fate of Tohno Shiki -Tsukihime, Tsukihime+, and Kagetsu Tohya. Melty Blood was a game spin off that used charecters from Tsukihime. 3.The Visual Novel Series that follow the fate of Emiya Shirou - Fate/Stay Night (try to play the reality nua version for the avalon ending), Fate/hollow Ataraxia. The first two routes of the Fate visual Novel have been adapted into anime series while the third route(heaven's feel) is being turned into an anime movie series. This was based on the Light Novel Fate/Prototype which had a female protagonist, and saber (King Arthur ) was male. 4. The light novel Fate/Zero. THis was written after Fate/Stay Night but chronologically takes place before it. Interestingly this was not written by nasu. This LN was also adapted into an anime by ufotable. 5. The game series following Hakuno Kishinami and his servants include - Fate/extra, Fate Extra CCC, and Fate Extella.Fate Extra CCC is currently untranslated. 6.Mahoutsukai no Yoru is a VN released in 2012 following Aoko Aozaki and occur chronologically before Tsukihime. THis is currently untranslated. 7.Fate/Apocrypha, is a 5 book LN series set in a parallel world to the original Fate/stay night, where the Einzbern's summoned a Ruler rather than an Avenger in the Third Holy Grail War, it focuses on the conflict between two factions. (the red and black faction). It is being adapted into an anime and the LN is not yet fully translated. 8.Fate/Grand Order is the new android/ios rpg that adds a bunch of new servants and lore to the nasuverse. The players are the masters and you can collect servants which then undergo turn based battle. (not exactly pokemon, but the turn system is kinda like that.) Several Short LN sides have been released such as Fate/Labyrinth (side for Fate/Apocrypha), or Lord El-Melloi II Case Files, (Side to Fate/Zero) Edit - To answer your question, both Fate/Prototype and Fate/Apocrypha are LN's which deal with the third holy grail war, though different events mean that the very nature of the war is different.

Hello again. It's been a few weeks since I last did this. I was busy with irl stuff and vacations. However, I am back with another progress update that should either be weekly or bi-weekly. We'll see how it goes once the prologue patch is out. Here are the updates. Translation Prologue - 100% (1791/1791) Main School - 70% (1895/2691) Branch School - 10% (572/5846) Total - 6% (4258/68206) TLC Prologue - 100% (1791/1791) Main School - 6% (157/2691) Branch School - 3% (187/5846) Total - 3% (2135/68206) Edit Prologue - 84% (1502/1791) As you can see, the translation for the main school has been going well. Editing is closing in on being finished for the prologue and then all there is is UI Work and QC before the prologue patch is released. Get hyped, everybody. We are still looking for a permanent TLC to work on this project. Please PM me if you're interested in working as a TLC for this project. I'll be back next week with another update. Until then, have a good rest of your week and see you later.

Continuing my adventure through the Ebi-hime's free VNs and the emotional rollercoaster only picks up speed. Lucky Me, Lucky You was actually the first non-pure-angst story among the ones I've read and I think it's superb. It's full of LGBT themes (I think it might be one of those degenerate games Bee was talking about when he got banned), but the characters feel surprisingly genuine and interesting. The protagonist (college freshman lesbian) uses foul language like I've probably never seen in a VN before and acts like a brat, but there's something surprisingly likeable about her, just like with her crossdressing, gay friend. And while those main characters sound like weirdos, it's never the main thing you think about or something the narrative focuses on. Their peculiarities are just part of who they are and the issues they face (especially the protagonist, who tries to cope with being dumped by a girlfriend she genuinely loved and to a lesser extent, being rejected by her family) are quite relatable and universal. In the end, it was a really great, casual story - the really nice art helped quite a lot too. And after that came Round the Mulberry Bush, going back to the historical setting, themes of interclass romance etc... And was one of the most devastating things I've ever read. I knew there would be some heavy stuff ahead of me after the first game, but damn, this is harsh.

The only worthwhile game

SO much... I would recommend you finish the Grisaia Trilogy for sure with Meikyuu https://vndb.org/v7723 and Rakuen https://vndb.org/v7724. Majikoi is a must-read for most people. Hilariously awesome series. https://vndb.org/v1143 Tsujidou-san no Jun'ai Road is by the same makers as Majikoi, another solid read. https://vndb.org/v9879 Fureraba was a surprisingly fun VN that was recently released. Solid read. https://vndb.org/v11856 I mean with how small your list is, there's just too much to possibly rec. Good places to start tho.

You're not limited to Steam as a release platform. VN devs finally need to stop abusing Steam. If they need porn that badly, maybe they should change their market. There's both Fakku and Nutaku available as well. Steam doesn't allow porn, simple as that. The non-steam patches are only a half-assed grey zone band aid to circumvent the inconvenience, Steam never really approved. At the same time, Steam is ready to actually allow sexual content in vns, providing it has either artistic or intellectual merit. Guess what - vast majority of 18+ vns don't have that - it's either porn or fan service for the heck of it, despite what community thinks. Adult visual novels could easily have more value to them, but so far most devs constantly prove otherwise through their own actions. It's plain hypocrisy and I'm honestly fed up with it. I'm not surprised at all they refused to publish Starnova as it stands now - it's meant to be an edgy, weeb-pandering porn game involving idols, lol. Complaining about this in general - especially as a developer - is just silly. Most devs got what was coming at them. Steam is not a platform to release porn games and 18+ visual novels. Period.

It is a game that was not supposed to be "Key" but ended like rehash of every other Key game due to no good ideas. In my opinion it doesn't suffer from that because let's be honest, who really has read Kanon or Air in this year of 2018? Instead of still trying to come up with NEW COOL stuff for the old fans, it is better to keep going the KEY path introducing the "genre" to new fans. Maeda himself doesn't really agree with this but this is only my opinion after all but I have to wonder if the writers thought this was good too. Maeda gave pretty much free hands to the 3 (there is actually 4) writers of the game and they went with KEY magic instead of something new Maeda wanted. The heroine routes are short, but so is the summer vacation, and has very little actual romance but that is to be expected from these short routes. The quality of these routes range from pretty meh to very emotional. None of this matters to be honest though because the secret of KEY games is the final emotional scene in the true route. People still talk about KEY games like they were MOST POP thing during their time but that is not true at all. They were popular yes but not the most popular ones. The reason why KEY games still have kind of a cult following is that they are all about that emotional final that makes them memorable. Summer Pockets belongs to this category too. Will it still be a big title in 10 years? Who knows. I have no idea really what other people thought about the true end lol. I can see the potential though. In the end it is a very KEY game with its multiple mini-games, hidden events inside the game that are fun to explore with a great cast, funny scenes, and filled with nostalgia. If you are a person that likes KEY (but don't know it yet) this is a game for you. If you are a person that likes KEY and have played all of their titles then not so much I guess. Depends if you mind the similar aspects of the story or not.

I just finished Fata Morgana this week and wrote up a little post on it if anyone is interested. (Beware lots of spoilers).

Summer Pockets seems more on the scale of Air instead of Clannad or Little Busters. It seems to be a decently large VN, but not as huge as some of Key's other ones.

Oh yeah now that I think about it that's the case isn't it? I felt curious because the games concept still seems to be from Jun Maeda but I guess it's also a little bit to soon to ask for any kind of opinion when the game isn't even out that long. I'll be patient That's awfully nice of you. To be honest I thought people would shrug their head when seeing this username but it's nice to know that there are people who can find it funny in a way. Thanks!

Well, I didn't read it and can't say for sure, but Summer Pockets has a different main writer than the titles you mentioned here, so I wouldn't expect it to have exactly the same writing style as them. On a bright note, apparently the main writer for this VN is also pretty good. Oh, and your username is pretty funny by the way.

Light Novels and visual novels are quite different. A light novel as you have experienced is a physical book with occational drawings here and there while a visual novel consist of a combination of text, drawings, sound and often voice acting. The typical way a visual novel is built up is that you have the majority of the time spent looking at character sprites over a background with text at the bottom and often voice acting for the written text. Other than that there are also some drawings that are used for specific scenes these are called CG. There is a wide variety of visual novels so I guess I could tell you some basic info. Most visual novels have some sort of choices that make the story move in a different direction. For instance some feature many cute girls and depending on your choices you get get into her character route where the main character who you play gets together with the girl, think of it as a harem anime, but where you can choose to go after the girl you like the best. It can also be used in things like mystery VNs where your choices determine how things turn out, whether or not you are sucessful or whether you fail. There is also another type called Kinect visual which is a visual novel without any choices, here you just progress through the story by clicking each time you want to move on to the next textline/voiceline, so the important thing is that there is no branching story. There are also some visual novels that are a hybrid with other types of game genres, for instance RPGs or fighters that use visual novel format for the storytelling parts. While they are quite different from light novels they still both have lots similarities in terms of writing and authors can often be writer for both types of media. For instance you mentioned spice and wolf, the author of spice and wolf also wrote the visual novel World End Economica.

I know a couple of detective Visual Novels since its one of my favorites! Although they are kinda old if that's alright with you, hope you like it!!! Eve: Bust Error Adam: The Double Factor Chain The Lost Foot Footprints Hmm... I still have one to recommend however you say don't like science fiction and supernatural elements and a big no no correct? Anyways here it is and never hurts to try.... Divi Dead Believe what you will, but the Supernaturals are very real... Heck even Hitler was a satanist, he even practices divination. Crazy dude And that's one of the reasons why he hated Jews... As for science fiction, long time ago, Artificial Intelligence, Jet Pack, Robots were a work of fiction. Time has passed then these things are now in the present and is very real... Fiction is a clever way to tell a lie even though it isn't Anyhow wish you all the best and hoping you'll widen your horizons, you'll be missing a lot if you disregard playing VNs/Games with science fiction or supernatural elements... Heck even a hardcore RTS gamer like me wants to take breaks from playing realistic WWII games such as Company Of Heroes, The Commandos Series, Men Of War, Sudden Strike. The list goes on

I bought this and I didn't really expect to the this entertained. Last time I had this much fun playing an eroge was while playing Kamidori Alchemy Meister.

Lol, I'll let you get caught up before throwing more in your face. There are dozens you should probably read. Grisaia is 2 games in itself and Majikoi is 4, plus I gave you 2 more recs. Post an update when you start nearing completion as no one likes having a huge backlog.

If you really think that and don't understand how the Germany worked then whatever. I recommend reading this https://fightthenewdrug.org/exposing-the-new-wave-of-extreme-hentai-animated-porn/

This is actually irrelevant in terms of niche communities. Steam only raises sales in terms of games that are tailored towards Steam users, everything outside that circle won't see much of a difference in terms of sales numbers. Steam also has no control over those people, either. My best advice is that devs should finally learn on how to advertise and promote their games before the release, instead of relying on Steam storefront. Some of the wildly successful indie titles had major exposition years before the release. It also shows how important it is to blog about your game during it's development; you're building your potential customer base that way.

If you ignore the whole 6% thing the other percentages look really good at least =)

So, I just watched the first episode of Happy Sugar Life and dag all I can say is that is so far a faithful adaption of the manga, with all that entails. Shits only going to get more fucked yo.

https://vndb.org/v16858 Based in past Japan. The protagonist is a Japanese magistrate in the Edo era. For a bit of background, a magistrate during the Edo era served as investigator chief, prosecutor, jury, and judge all in one. Because of this, magistrates in the later Edo era were often badly corrupt or obsessed with making examples rather than discovering the truth of an incident. The protagonist is a strait-laced type though. Butterfly Seeker would have been a recommendation for me, if the protagonist wasn't a (very limited) psychic. It is one of the few mystery VNs I've honestly enjoyed. The protagonist in this one is part of a school club of detective trainees, each with a peculiar talent (such as the main heroine's extreme empathy, another one's analytical abilities, or the last one's natural talent for subduing suspects). He's got a sort of Hannibal Lector/Clarice dynamic going with an imprisoned killer that makes it more interesting, at least to me. Same thing for Sakura no Mori Dreamers (both are based in cities with extremely high murder rates from serial killings), though Sakura no Mori is a lot more heavy on the fantasy crap.

From what I've read so far, Chaos;Child has a lot of elements of detective work and is basically a giant mystery. I've been really enjoying it so far and I think you should try it out.

Yes I've been busy beavering away at the main school translation. I should make it clear that's the common part of the main school route. The bulk of the translation is unique heroine path text, and that's what's not listed there, and why the total is only 6%.

So no Umineko for you? Well, ~if~ you change your mind about supernatural elements, go for Umineko no Naku Koro Ni. As for games, I really can't remember any. What I can recommend is to read Agatha Christie, and you probably know why.

You are basically arguing that Steam is the defacto platform for selling games, giving them a monopoly. If this is the case, they could be hit with an antitrust lawsuit for abusing their monopoly to prevent publishers from getting a fair chance to reach customers. The inconsistency just makes it worse because it gives the impression that they will indeed keep certain title/people out for no objective reasons. The problem is I find it very unrealistic that they will be met with an antitrust. It doesn't come trough as a high profile "we stand with the people" kind of case. I can find a lot of other reasons, which are more likely to cause an antitrust case against Valve, like you don't own the games you buy. You rent them for a one time fee. This allows them to force changes to you against your will, like 64 bit only updates on 32 bit computers or windows 10 only updates on earlier versions of windows. They kill XP support in half a year or so, yet they have games, which are too old to run on win7. Still no refund. It's also horrible at breaking savegames and mods, not to mention horrible for mod creators. The only good thing about it is the fact that everybody is on it. It sucks in all other aspects. They can also disable accounts, making people lose access to all their rented stuff. There is also the issue of updates breaking savegames/mods, which you can't prevent from being installed. More or less all competitors have better technical solutions and more user friendly. The only reason to use Steam is because they are the biggest. Sure sounds like a monopoly to me. The worst part: we can't do anything about it. Antitrust laws are designed to prevent this from happening, but even perfect laws are worthless if they aren't enforced. Yes and no. Yes in the sense that Valve is a private company and can sell what they want. No because Valve controls the customers. I wouldn't be surprised if VNs on Steam VNs sells 20+ times more than non-Steam VNs even with the same contents. In other words for a publisher, it's entirely possible that getting on Steam is a question of profit or bankruptcy. Moving a VN from Steam to say FAKKU will leave the customers on Steam, which will then buy a non-VN instead. The vast majority will not seek out FAKKU. This is the core issue: Steam is hording most of the customers.

just when i wanted to state the exact same u already did. totally surprised there´s so much of a riot coming to said title´s delayed approval. and before someone´s starts the usual whitenightening of pioneers, nah, its devs are also totally no doing the oelvn scene any good by going the full weeb way of life, including a fuckfest full of jp tropes, casting jp va´s instead of native ones etc...

That's one of rare genre in the VNs there, so the title itself is quite limited. As for the translated one maybe you can try Phoenix Wright, especially the Investigation spinoffs. While if you want to try untranslated one, perhaps you can try both of Caucasus and Pianissimo (Both from same developer as Kara no Shoujo). Also if you still didn't try that yet, you can try OELVN Lucid9. I hope my recommendations will be helpful to you.

Have you played Cartagra or Kara No Shoujo yet? If not then go for that.

If your mind is already in grey zone then you should get help. Literally any movie, book etc. that features rape could push you over. That is like saying any porn pushes you further to more hardcore stuff. This same could be applied to lolicons too and I'm sure a person like you won't admit it lol. Lots of people will play Rapelay without interest to rape because 3D porn simulators are all good fap material.

Well, that would be the ideal state of affairs IMO. Steam that respects its own rules and brings the all-ages VN experience to weirdos like myself, that prefers those versions in the vast majority of cases and would be happy about originally all-ages titles being in a less sketchy environment. The problem is, it was Valve's desition to be consistently lenient towards the 18+ patches and porn sneaking its way on the platform, make some explicit rules on how it should be done (keeping the patches off-steam, not discussing/directing to the porn in the community spaces etc.) and then asks devs who operated under a rather stable set of rules for a long time to wait for possibly months after months, with no timetable (which means no possibility for proper planning/reacting to this setback) and apparently no workarounds that could mitigate the costs of such a delay. Devs are actually pretty quiet about it, as they know they're in "sticks vs nukes" situation against Valve. I just find how shitty the Steam administrations acts pretty inexcusable - no matter what ideal scenario we might come up with, I'm pretty sure Valve won't do much about it, as it would require them actually making some desitions and then curate stuff to a minimal extent. Now they're just stalling, making other people's lives miserable in the process until they make some filters that they hope will make the problem sort itself out. I'm not channelling devs' outrage here - I'm channelling my own, because all sides deserve a storefront with some kind of consistency and responsibility behind it. The only thing Valve does is making sure they're not responsible for anything.

I'm kind of surprised Steam allowed Maitetsu at all... that game is one I don't think should have been localized in the first place, for the sake of the community. I'd feel the same way if someone tried to localize Monobeno, for the same reason... the games are tailor-made to cause a major lolicon debate in public here in the US. I have to wonder if people realize just how thin a line the Western eroge (localization and making both) industry is walking...

By the title alone, we can see you also posted this on reddit Well, Valve's being Valve again. This time they created quite a sneaky but working way to ban "waifu games" without actually banning then. Say that you'll develop a filtering tool, and release it together with Half Life 3. In the meantime, VNs will be forever hidden for everyone. And then there's Maitetsu, it's a surprise it's still there considering what happened with Key to Home. So guess it's a good time to everyone here to learn how to use Mangagamer's store, Denpasoft, Fakku, itch.io and any other alternative and jump ship. I remember seeing some people celebrating that we won the "waifu holocaust" but, as imagined, we lost it.

Here is a list of all the VNs that have officially released in english sorted based on numbers of votes on vndb and the average vote of the titles. While it is not really a recommandation it should get you quickly cought up on the official releases you missed while you were gone As for what I recommend well atm I am having a really fun time playing through Princess Evangile so I would recommend that.

Stein;s Gate

maju de watashi ni koi shinasai

Ayakashibito

The biggest one: We need to stop treating VNs like they're Video Games Lite. I think we're all guilty of this (myself included), but by doing so, we're effectively limiting VNs' potential reader base to just gamers. An assumption I see often is that gameplay VNs like Ace Attorney or Danganronpa are inherently more newbie-friendly than normal VNs or especially kinetic novels. This only makes sense if you're assuming that you're trying to market VNs to gamers. I'm not saying that it's bad to try to get gamers into VNs, but why should we limit ourselves to that? Why are they the only audience that we're trying to get? Other groups who might be interested in visual novels: Regular novel readers. Yes, they still exist. This is such an obvious thing to me (after all, we're trying to promote visual novels) that it almost amazes me that almost nobody considers that people who like to read might be interested in...well, reading. Comics fans, especially fans of indie comics. We're seeing a tiny bit of overlap between indie comics and EVNs already. I read a short yuri VN named Serre by Adrienne Bazir not too long ago that does really nice things with CGs and sprite animations (especially considering she did everything except the music/sound effects). There's also an interactive graphic novel (which I haven't had the opportunity to buy yet) that came out recently named It Will Be Hard that I've seen get a good reception. I don't know if it'd be called a VN per se, but surely it'd be of interest to people who are interested in interactive storytelling? There's a lot of things that our mediums could learn from each other if we bothered to expand outside our normal horizons. People with disabilities who can't/don't want to play "normal" video games. After all, 99% of VNs have no interactivity beyond clicking to advance the text and possibly making choices. This makes them inherently more accessible than 99% of video games. There are some things to keep in consideration (for example, making sure you can access the menu easily; adding screen reader or text-to-speech support for visually-impaired readers; adding an option to use a dyslexic-friendly font like OpenDyslexic), but overall, making a VN accessible is much easier than making your average video game accessible. More things that would help VNs' reputation and encourage people to check out the medium: Stop pretending that porn is a necessary component to VNs. I'm not saying "drop the porn" (that'd be hypocritical of me, since I've wished for more 18+ otome in the past), but it's off-putting to a lot of people, and a lot of time it's shoehorned in anyway. Sex in VNs should be treated the same way as it is in books: some books have sex in them, in some books (erotica) sex is the whole point, but you don't need to have sex in a novel for it to be considered literature, nor does having a sex scene in it automatically disqualify a book from being literature. Longer is not always better. I personally like long stories, but a lot of people just don't have the time (or, yes, attention span) for a 50-hour epic. There's value in shorter VNs that tell a good story not just despite, but because of their length...similarly, by holding longer works up on a pedestal, we're encouraging creators to add pointless shit to pad the length of their stories, which just wastes everyone's time. We need to support diverse VNs by diverse creators. Diverse settings, diverse characters, diverse plots, diverse artwork. Basically have something for everyone. There's nothing wrong with high school stories, but it's boring when it seems like that's the only setting that people will read. Part of this is supporting EVNs and EVN creators, who may not have the budgets that the big Japanese eroge creators do, but who are still doing cool stuff. (There's this weird perception that EVNs try too hard to be like JVNs and are all set in Japanese high schools, which hasn't been the case for years? Katawa Shoujo and DDLC aren't representative of the EVN scene as a whole, for a lot of reasons. I will say that there's a disproportionately high number of anime-style EVNs, but even then there are plenty of exceptions. That's just the first few I found when going through my VNDB collection.) I think the reaction to this year's AX announcements really shows how much pushback there can be against stories that don't fit into the mold of "normal" eroge: JAST USA announced three BL VNs, and MangaGamer announced one BL and one yuri VN, and people are complaining about this year's AX being "overly gay," or about how MG has supposedly "abandoned" the "traditional eroge audience" (never mind that they also announced two Rance games and already have plenty of "normal" eroge in the pipeline) and is now a "fujoshi paradise." I understand the appeal of self-inserting, but some of my favorite stories have been about people very different from me--in fact, a fully-fleshed character who's very different from me can be easier to relate to than a blank-slate protagonist. Basically, if I can read through VNs with straight male protagonists and manage to enjoy them, a straight guy can read through an otome or BL game without...dying, or whatever you think will happen if you touch something not aimed at straight men. Don't promote lolicon/shotacon stuff. This creeps out the vast majority of people, myself included. Maitetsu was a mistake. Just because it's legal (in the US) doesn't mean we have to support it.

The sad truth is, where porn or fanservice aren't involved, those games aren't popular either. VNs are mostly about reading and no one really reads nowadays, especially gamers; the reading rates have been constantly dropping across the world. When you compare the sales numbers of popular games like Nekopara and story-driven, plot-heavy all-ages titles you will see they barely sell at all; no matter how good they are and how well praised they get by critics, Steam curators and gaming websites, they won't ever be able to fight with those. It's another reason why we get so little of them and what gets translated nowadays are typically light charage and moege instead. VNs are destined to remain a niche and interesting vns will always be a niche within a niche. It's because the population those games were once directed at is actually declining and new generation that's ought to replace it remains completely different.

TAKE YOUR BLASPHEMOUS IDEAS SOMEWHERE ELSE, YOU HEATHEN!!!!!

Nekopara and Sakura games are easily-accessible, visually flashy sources of porn and that created their broad appeal. DDLC was a viral sensation, but it won't happen again anytime soon and its influence on the popularization of VNs is unclear, also thanks to the elitist VN snobs that consider it an unholy spawn of Satan that should be eradicated along with everyone that enjoyed it. ;p Seriously, though, I think VNs are getting slightly more mainstream over time (things like them entering GOG might be huge in the long run), but how I see it, especially when it goes to Japanese ones, the stigma connected to them and the actual cultural distance (like the approach to loli content)* might be simply not something easily crossable - maybe not in our lifetimes. At least as long as all ages games in the VN format are by default associated with eroge, they'll not break out of their cum-stained little corner, with few exceptions such as Steins;Gate being significant, but not really changing much for the rest of them. Things like JAST parading a pornstar as the face of their AnimeExpo event (or the fact that MangaGamer site is still one of the ugliest things on the Internet) don't help much either. And I don't say that to attack anyone's fapping pleasures, I'm just slowly realizing how foreign most VNs are to Western sensibilities. The real way in which I see them expanding is through the broader distribution of the gateway drugs of quality all-ages releases and non-erotic or mildly erotic EVNs. Katawa Shoujo is such a great entry-level VN because it does a lot to make the player comfortable - it approaches its themes tastefully and with actual thought, makes ero content optional and does not ask you to invest large sums of money into something you're not sure is your thing. Promoting EVNs, making the scene that is more focused on storytelling aspects of the medium rather than smut more visible is the way to go. Fuwanovel once did quite a good job of covering the EVN market, back when nearly everything it produced was pure crap. Now, when there's actually stuff to see there, we're silent. Maybe I'm wrong and there's much more room for VNs to expand simply as a particularly attractive source of porn. Still, investing countless hours into reading your fapping material is also not something I would expect to go mainstream in the West and I'm not sure anyone of this Forums would be happy with nukige being the main thing brought here. The other problem I see and someone can correct me if I'm wrong, is the piss-poor marketing of Japanese VNs in the West, mostly directed towards the already-existing fanbase. Why is something as good as Dies Irae not a freakin' bestseller on Steam? Why most chuunige, with no questionable content and story elements and stylistic beloved by zillions of anime fans in the West, sell like absolute shit? There's little money and little conviction in how most VN companies treat their Western releases and I'm not sure if that will ever change. And what we can do, as fans? I wonder. I'll tell you in three years whether my grassroots effort did anything, because promoting VNs is most of what I do lately. ;p * Not to insult anyone's taste's, but if it was Maitetsu and not Analogue that introduced me to VNs, I would probably run for the hills and never come back.