Leaderboard

I personally think that VNs right now are in a sense stuck in a cursed loop. VNs as a medium just really lack variety and as a result appeal to a small number of people. Even most all-ages titles follow the same story structure: even in non-adult titles a male protagonist always has to be surrounded by a lot of female love interests; it almost always has to take place in high-school; even in plot-focused stories there are a lot of slice-of-life scenes, which aren't even well written, and mostly just serve as a way to stall the story for some time rather than developing the characters; finally, the personalities of the protagonist, the heroines and even the side characters typically just follow certain well-known archetypes. So, if you just happen not to enjoy some of these titles and just want to find something more unique, you're much better off watching some anime or reading a manga. Otome games are a bit different, but, from my limited experience with them, they seem to have a bag of different, though slightly similar, problems. There are indeed some unique and experimental VNs that do things differently, but most of these are doujin titles and don't get that much exposure. Most of them aren't even that good, since good authors are likely to join some company at some point and start making a lot more standard VNs, or leave the medium altogether. Also, we, the current VN fans, enjoy these tropes to at lest to some extend, and a lot of us actually prefer them. As a result, in a short run it's not a very good strategy for companies to experiment with story structures, since they don't know if the fans would like these changes, and they just stick to the strategy that worked thus far. And VNs are also expensive to make, so they don't allow for much flexibility. Nowadays, manga and light novel authors don't even have to make any initial investment at all, since they just can start posting their stories online and see how people react to them, or even completely stick to episodic online distribution. In case of VNs, even a single financially unsuccessful product can make a whole company go bankrupt. I personally think that if VNs somehow let this loop, there's a good chance that they would start appeal to a bigger number of people. They probably wouldn't be the same people as the current VN fans. Will they ever do that? I doubt it, but I don't know. EVNs might actually lead to something interesting at some point, who knows?

I've always been kinda disappointed that visual novels aren't more popular. I thought of different reasons of why that may be and made it into a video, analyzing why.

Try check Documents folder.

I think that one of the problems with VNs is that so many of the heavily recommended VNs are very long. So many of the ones that are really often recommended and very highly rated are 50-100 hour titles and I just don't think that getting into something where those types of titles are seen as an introduction is easy. Another thing is how so many in the community tries highlight VNs as some sort of high art superior to every other medium and completely disregard anything part of the VN market that doesn't adhere to what they consider good, like calling moege and nukige trash and trying to make it out to be as if VNs would be way more amazing and mainstream had it not been for those damn genres. I personally think that one of the ways to get people into VNs would be to actually get people into things like moege or nukige as I think there are a lot of people who would want harem anime and manga to actually have conclusive endings and based on the amount of 18+ doujins of popular characters there is a demand for ero content with characters you actually get emotionally attatched to during a story. I think trying to highlight VNs as having good stories won't really do much as every medium has good stories to offer, I think instead it is important to highlight the things which makes VNs special and the types of content you either won't find in other mediums or you won't find done as well. Some I would highlight is integration of porn in the story, harem stories with branching routes and romantic development as well as mystery which can be enhanced by route and choice systems. Take nekopara for instance, in the realm of moege it was well done but nothing special, but it managed to go sort of mainstream and there seems to be quite a large base of people who are fans of it outside of the VN communities. I think some of this love people have for it comes from how it has done stuff they haven't seen before as they haven't gotten into VNs.