Nandemonai

Gameplay elements are a lot harder to design and test and get working.  That means they cost a lot more money.  These games are made on shoestring budgets.  There are companies that specialize in 'gameplay titles' out there.  And most of the time, those titles are not known for having a strong story.
In other words, it's pouring a lot more dev resources into something that's not the core selling point of your game (which is, pretty much like you said, a novel with added production value).
These guys make money by being happy to be the niche players.  Or to put it another way - your point is essentially the same reasoning publishers use when they say 'Graft a multiplayer mode onto game X!  Just freaking do it, we don't even care if it makes sense, gamers like it!'  Sometimes that works out (Mass Effect 3) and other times, not so much (Resident Evil 3).
These companies are like Atlus (well, before Sega bought them).  They know how to survive in a low-volume market.  If they wanted to make mass-market-appeal games, they'd be making a different kind of game entirely.  Not every game has to be mass market.
If you want to know 'why aren't there more releases in English', here's your problem.  There are a decent number of games.  Heck, there's some you haven't even listed (like Koihime Musou, or Aselia the Eternal, or - and I'm being serious here - Persona 4 Arena).  I've been around since the early 2000's, and I converted into a paying customer when I found out a VN was lucky to sell a few hundred copies.  The numbers I hear nowadays are they're lucky to sell two thousand.  These games are absolutely popular enough already in English.  Just not with people who actually pay.
I'll put it this way:  The raw untranslated script for SKM is about 6 megabytes.  Rounded down to 5 to account for repeated text and punctuation, etc - at 5 cents per character (very low end of the going rate) and 2 bytes per character that's $250K.  How many copies do you need to sell to make that back at $40?  6250.  Then there's licensing fees, and we know that MangaGamer said 'if the original KM doesn't sell 2000 copies, we can't pay for the voice so we'll have to remove it'.  There's more voice, so bump that up a little.
You're probably looking at 8500-9000 copies just to break even.  And now you know why MangaGamer hasn't done it.  They can't pay the translator a decent rate.  They'd have to find someone willing to be significantly underpaid.
But suppose for a minute Koihime had sold - instead of the probably 2500-3500 copies it likely sold (it sold > 2K, they added the voices back) - 6 or 7 times that number.  Then licensing the sequel would be a no-brainer.  It would have been out years ago, probably.  Furthermore, every game that was remotely worth releasing would be getting licensed and released.
It's the same story with other text-heavy Japanese products.  RPGs were a niche product.  Every time an RPG was released in English, the company releasing it was taking a risk.  And then FF7 came out, and it was one of the first videogames to do cinematic awesome cutscenes well, and it was absolutely in the right place at the right time to do gangbusters.  Prior to FF7, RPGs had been building in popularity slowly, but post-FF7, an audience was there and realized 'maybe I should pay more attention, this looks nifty'.  Post-FF7, most major JRPGs got translated (but not all).   The same thing happened again a few years later, when the quirky-and-cutesy-Japanesey style games caught on.  First was Disgaea, which was an amazing game and sold out instantly and Atlus reprinted it and then NIS (the makers) founded NIS America, which has gone on to do very well.  Then Recettear sold hundreds of thousands of copies on Steam, proving to everyone 'no really, people will buy the weeb shit'.
VNs don't need to be made into something they're not in order to start selling.  In fact I'd wager they're already starting to sell.  Look at the huge uptick in otome releases, and console releases.

Gameplay elements are a lot harder to design and test and get working.  That means they cost a lot more money.  These games are made on shoestring budgets.  There are companies that specialize in 'gameplay titles' out there.  And most of the time, those titles are not known for having a strong story.
In other words, it's pouring a lot more dev resources into something that's not the core selling point of your game (which is, pretty much like you said, a novel with added production value).
These guys make money by being happy to be the niche players.  Or to put it another way - your point is essentially the same reasoning publishers use when they say 'Graft a multiplayer mode onto game X!  Just freaking do it, we don't even care if it makes sense, gamers like it!'  Sometimes that works out (Mass Effect 3) and other times, not so much (Resident Evil 3).
These companies are like Atlus (well, before Sega bought them).  They know how to survive in a low-volume market.  If they wanted to make mass-market-appeal games, they'd be making a different kind of game entirely.  Not every game has to be mass market.
If you want to know 'why aren't there more releases in English', here's your problem.  There are a decent number of games.  Heck, there's some you haven't even listed (like Koihime Musou, or Aselia the Eternal, or - and I'm being serious here - Persona 4 Arena).  I've been around since the early 2000's, and I converted into a paying customer when I found out a VN was lucky to sell a few hundred copies.  The numbers I hear nowadays are they're lucky to sell two thousand.  These games are absolutely popular enough already in English.  Just not with people who actually pay.
I'll put it this way:  The raw untranslated script for SKM is about 6 megabytes.  Rounded down to 5 to account for repeated text and punctuation, etc - at 5 cents per character (very low end of the going rate) and 2 bytes per character that's $250K.  How many copies do you need to sell to make that back at $40?  6250.  Then there's licensing fees, and we know that MangaGamer said 'if the original KM doesn't sell 2000 copies, we can't pay for the voice so we'll have to remove it'.  There's more voice, so bump that up a little.
You're probably looking at 8500-9000 copies just to break even.  And now you know why MangaGamer hasn't done it.  They can't pay the translator a decent rate.  They'd have to find someone willing to be significantly underpaid.
But suppose for a minute Koihime had sold - instead of the probably 2500-3500 copies it likely sold (it sold > 2K, they added the voices back) - 6 or 7 times that number.  Then licensing the sequel would be a no-brainer.  It would have been out years ago, probably.  Furthermore, every game that was remotely worth releasing would be getting licensed and released.
It's the same story with other text-heavy Japanese products.  RPGs were a niche product.  Every time an RPG was released in English, the company releasing it was taking a risk.  And then FF7 came out, and it was one of the first videogames to do cinematic awesome cutscenes well, and it was absolutely in the right place at the right time to do gangbusters.  Prior to FF7, RPGs had been building in popularity slowly, but post-FF7, an audience was there and realized 'maybe I should pay more attention, this looks nifty'.  Post-FF7, most major JRPGs got translated (but not all).   The same thing happened again a few years later, when the quirky-and-cutesy-Japanesey style games caught on.  First was Disgaea, which was an amazing game and sold out instantly and Atlus reprinted it and then NIS (the makers) founded NIS America, which has gone on to do very well.  Then Recettear sold hundreds of thousands of copies on Steam, proving to everyone 'no really, people will buy the weeb shit'.
VNs don't need to be made into something they're not in order to start selling.  In fact I'd wager they're already starting to sell.  Look at the huge uptick in otome releases, and console releases.

As someone who currently work on VNTS, I'll just say that I'm still following the updates of Shin Koihime Musou here. While normally I should note the line progress here, I rarely note that in my VNTS Reviews because I prefer to write the editing progress whenever the percentage change in the reviews. Of course I took the note on the lines update when it come to my other VNTS, so yeah I know that the project is still ongoing here. Good luck on your editing work there.
PS - It's too bad that there's no more VNTS in the front page as of now, seeing that admin Tay was probably quite busy and that currently our Decay was very busy in Nekonyan's works.

I have been remiss in one thing.  Now that this thread has been necro'ed, I see it.  I never formally announced I wasn't going to be updating here anymore.  The updates just stopped.  I didn't even provide the link to the real status tracker pasted half a page or so above.  So here goes...
This project is not cancelled.  I am editing it.  This thread will not receive periodic updates with percentages anymore.  That was mostly useful because VNTS pulled numbers from here, and VNTS was high profile so feeding it accurate numbers was useful.  But there is no more VNTS and never will be again (the 2 updates last July only hammer that point home).  So there's no point in manually compiling percentage data to dump into posts here.  All that data is automatically tracked at the project official tracker: https://cookie4.com/projects/skm1/progress/
Progress is slow.  I wasn't happy with the original work I'd done, so I started over.  The percentage didn't reset to 0, so all the lines I edited before still show as edited.  Consequently a bunch of work doesn't show up there, and that will stay a problem more or less until I finish Shoku.

I have been remiss in one thing.  Now that this thread has been necro'ed, I see it.  I never formally announced I wasn't going to be updating here anymore.  The updates just stopped.  I didn't even provide the link to the real status tracker pasted half a page or so above.  So here goes...
This project is not cancelled.  I am editing it.  This thread will not receive periodic updates with percentages anymore.  That was mostly useful because VNTS pulled numbers from here, and VNTS was high profile so feeding it accurate numbers was useful.  But there is no more VNTS and never will be again (the 2 updates last July only hammer that point home).  So there's no point in manually compiling percentage data to dump into posts here.  All that data is automatically tracked at the project official tracker: https://cookie4.com/projects/skm1/progress/
Progress is slow.  I wasn't happy with the original work I'd done, so I started over.  The percentage didn't reset to 0, so all the lines I edited before still show as edited.  Consequently a bunch of work doesn't show up there, and that will stay a problem more or less until I finish Shoku.

I have been remiss in one thing.  Now that this thread has been necro'ed, I see it.  I never formally announced I wasn't going to be updating here anymore.  The updates just stopped.  I didn't even provide the link to the real status tracker pasted half a page or so above.  So here goes...
This project is not cancelled.  I am editing it.  This thread will not receive periodic updates with percentages anymore.  That was mostly useful because VNTS pulled numbers from here, and VNTS was high profile so feeding it accurate numbers was useful.  But there is no more VNTS and never will be again (the 2 updates last July only hammer that point home).  So there's no point in manually compiling percentage data to dump into posts here.  All that data is automatically tracked at the project official tracker: https://cookie4.com/projects/skm1/progress/
Progress is slow.  I wasn't happy with the original work I'd done, so I started over.  The percentage didn't reset to 0, so all the lines I edited before still show as edited.  Consequently a bunch of work doesn't show up there, and that will stay a problem more or less until I finish Shoku.

It's pretty much just me at this point, and I have a real job so that takes up a lot of my time.  Don't expect a release anytime soon, but it is still being worked on.

It's pretty much just me at this point, and I have a real job so that takes up a lot of my time.  Don't expect a release anytime soon, but it is still being worked on.

It's pretty much just me at this point, and I have a real job so that takes up a lot of my time.  Don't expect a release anytime soon, but it is still being worked on.

It's pretty much just me at this point, and I have a real job so that takes up a lot of my time.  Don't expect a release anytime soon, but it is still being worked on.

As I recall, there were several other girls you could have sex with, and the school nurse would give you a condom when you went to see her.  If you had sex with any of them (except the one who told you she was on the pill) without using the condom, they'd get pregnant.
You'd also get in trouble for having sex with the main heroine's sisters (they aren't main heroines) but I don't think they got pregnant.

Damn I'm not even that much of an old hag yet but I feel this thread, this one game I started recently made me go all mom to the high and middle school kids like "I want to adopt them then pat their head, brush their hair and ask how was their day at school" while going all THIRST for those anime dudes in his late 20s early 30s thicc asses so I like ousans now thanks for coming to my ted talk

Clannad, Little Busters, Grisaia, and Majikoi were all fantls before the companies bought the finished or nearly-finished product.  Essentially, rather than paying in advance for something that might take years to finish, they payed for something that just needed to be polished and could potentially be released sooner with less expense in the long run.

I thought they were just friends, I never would have guessed that consequences is related to irresponsibility.

Thing is, he might bring over his cousin "consequences" and nobody likes him.

Yep.  Participation has also dropped off in recent years, I believe, but don't quote me on that.

There is a group, kinda sorta in between the ESRB and a Standards & Practices body, called SoFuRin / EOCS.  Like the ESRB, it was formed in response to political pressure.  Game developers would agree to abide by their restrictions and for awhile, all the major VN makers were members.  This body actually standardized the way the schools are described, and it used generic words that don't imply anything about the age of the students, and it mandated not discussing the issue.  (It also banned real incest for awhile, but that was eventually relaxed.  This is why so many games did pseudo-incest, where protag-kun is adopted or bangs all his step-sisters or what have you.)
This is wrong.  It depends on what jurisdiction you're in, and the Miller Test (the controlling law in the area) has a lot of stuff but it essentially boils down to 'if it turns the stomach of the jury you're going to be convicted'.
 

There is a group, kinda sorta in between the ESRB and a Standards & Practices body, called SoFuRin / EOCS.  Like the ESRB, it was formed in response to political pressure.  Game developers would agree to abide by their restrictions and for awhile, all the major VN makers were members.  This body actually standardized the way the schools are described, and it used generic words that don't imply anything about the age of the students, and it mandated not discussing the issue.  (It also banned real incest for awhile, but that was eventually relaxed.  This is why so many games did pseudo-incest, where protag-kun is adopted or bangs all his step-sisters or what have you.)
This is wrong.  It depends on what jurisdiction you're in, and the Miller Test (the controlling law in the area) has a lot of stuff but it essentially boils down to 'if it turns the stomach of the jury you're going to be convicted'.
 

There is a group, kinda sorta in between the ESRB and a Standards & Practices body, called SoFuRin / EOCS.  Like the ESRB, it was formed in response to political pressure.  Game developers would agree to abide by their restrictions and for awhile, all the major VN makers were members.  This body actually standardized the way the schools are described, and it used generic words that don't imply anything about the age of the students, and it mandated not discussing the issue.  (It also banned real incest for awhile, but that was eventually relaxed.  This is why so many games did pseudo-incest, where protag-kun is adopted or bangs all his step-sisters or what have you.)
This is wrong.  It depends on what jurisdiction you're in, and the Miller Test (the controlling law in the area) has a lot of stuff but it essentially boils down to 'if it turns the stomach of the jury you're going to be convicted'.
 

There is a group, kinda sorta in between the ESRB and a Standards & Practices body, called SoFuRin / EOCS.  Like the ESRB, it was formed in response to political pressure.  Game developers would agree to abide by their restrictions and for awhile, all the major VN makers were members.  This body actually standardized the way the schools are described, and it used generic words that don't imply anything about the age of the students, and it mandated not discussing the issue.  (It also banned real incest for awhile, but that was eventually relaxed.  This is why so many games did pseudo-incest, where protag-kun is adopted or bangs all his step-sisters or what have you.)
This is wrong.  It depends on what jurisdiction you're in, and the Miller Test (the controlling law in the area) has a lot of stuff but it essentially boils down to 'if it turns the stomach of the jury you're going to be convicted'.
 

Next thing you're gonna ask is if people under 18 actually avoid adult content because of the disclaimer

As there are some games where heroines are literally kindergartners, it is safe to say that the Japanese heroines must be over 18 in high school, or even in middle school, because they graduate from kindergarten after they are 18.

Buy the official version. Pirate release is still bugged from what I know.

It would have been nice to just stick with Siglus, but the cost of the license was prohibitive. One of the main things we had to forfeit is the Twitter integration, which was a fun gimmick in the original version. Other than that, we've had to scale back some of the menu options such as skipping back a line or changing opacity of the text box. Of course these are things that could be implemented in Kirikiri with enough time and resources, but the cost was out of the scope of this project. Still, I think the game looks great and functions well, especially for this price point
Edit// I just saw that Wildbreed responded above, and their post answers most of the questions! Thanks! ^^

the ability to Jump to any voice line from the backlog...which was there is the original is not available here
The ability to replay the voice from any voice-line  from the backlog is also missing.. this was there in the original..
The ability to change the opacity of the text box which was there in the original is also missing here..
The above 3 are the only ones that i am aware off but there could be more...
However for the price-point on offer.. i am willing to compromise for the above .. that said i wouldn't have minded paying a bit extra to include the text box opacity option...Thankfully the textbox opacity that they have included by default is to my liking....