OELVNs: Their Past, Present and Future

[Nier]

4 hours ago, Kiso said:

And of so has it already made VNs popular in the west?... And if so has Fuwanovel lost its purpose of existence?! Making VNs popular in the west created a cancer fan base in the west too, so err let me shield myself with Japanese barrier.

You are thinking of https://lemmasoft.renai.us/forums/

 

3 hours ago, Nandemonai said:

At that time, nearly all console games were Japanese.

That's not really the case, if you go back and check back on the library you will actually notice that quite a sizable amount of them were actually western, but those are games that you never gave your attention to because, well they sucked.

The PS and Xbox have a big library of western games and all of them go for alot less than what the japanese games go for, just take a look at the category on ebay of brand new factory sealed PS1 games even the rare western games that are more than 20 years old don't even go for much more than 100 USD, while the rarest japanese games can go up to 500 USD, Rule of Rose anyone?

Look on ebay for the most expensive OG Xbox games, the games on the Xbox platforms never goes up in prices like the games do on the Playstation patform and despite the fact that the OG Xbox had a majority of western games as it's library, the most expensive factory sealed Xbox games now are all japanese.

Look at the list of the most expensive Super NES games, all japanese, despite the fact that there is also a sizable amount of western games in the Super NES library.

 

3 hours ago, Nandemonai said:

Now, if I'm not mistaken, the Japanese VN market is in a serious crisis right now.  Sales have plummeted compared to where they were ten years ago, and seem to have reached a new stable point.  Naturally, this will affect product quality.  OELVN developers also have not had very long to mature compared to the Japanese market.  So in the future, I would be very surprised if the OELVN market did not significantly improve from where it is now.  It just depends on what kind of timeframe you're talking about.  Six months from now probably looks a lot like today.  Six years?  Not so much.  Six decades?  The Japanese VN industry isn't even six decades old yet!  Who the hell knows?

There are quite a bit of western made "Mangas", have they even gotten big? Do alot of people even talk about them? Do people even care?

I think it's pretty obvious that OELVNs will always remain a hobbyist creation unlike how it is in Japan where it is both a hobbyist creation (doujin) and a professional creation, which is not necesserly bad because the western video game industry is to the west what the anime industry is to Japan, the anime industry leaves no room for originality anymore, it's either moe, ecchi, harem and/or oppai or you can kiss your buisness goodbye, Manglobe anyone? Same problem in the western video game industry which has so many restrictions, that there is basically no room for originality, it's just as a japanese dev once said "they make their games like they make their movies".

So let's pretend for a minute that in the impossible event that OELVN would become a professional created product like it is in Japan (yeah never gonna happen, what sells in the west is shooters and other stuff that Otakus have no interest in) it would fall under heavy restrictions of what is "acceptable" or isn't, what is "sexualization" or isn't, what is "unrealistic" and other such nonsense and it certainly wouldn't be allowed to use anime art as that would be too "asian", basically it would be a Hollywood movie in novelized video game form.

OELVN will always obviously remain niche and "indie", just like the western made "mangas", but at the same time they are able to retain a freedom of creation that wouldn't have been possible otherwise if they were working under the pressure of a corporation such Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Activision and the likes.

 

18 minutes ago, Rooke said:

Interestingly enough, what really evened the playing field was the changing of console hardware. Console hardware these days are almost glorified PCs,

They actually are, you can not even just flip the off switch on the PS3 or PS4 like you did on PS1 and PS2, if you do that next time you turn on the console you will get a message that tells you that the console was shut down incorrectly last time. So basically you can not simply turn off your PS3/PS4 like you can not just simply turn off your PC, otherwise you risk damaging it.

[Narcosis]

3 hours ago, Nandemonai said:

Now, if I'm not mistaken, the Japanese VN market is in a serious crisis right now.  Sales have plummeted compared to where they were ten years ago, and seem to have reached a new stable point.  Naturally, this will affect product quality.  OELVN developers also have not had very long to mature compared to the Japanese market.  So in the future, I would be very surprised if the OELVN market did not significantly improve from where it is now.  It just depends on what kind of timeframe you're talking about.  Six months from now probably looks a lot like today.  Six years?  Not so much.  Six decades?  The Japanese VN industry isn't even six decades old yet!  Who the hell knows?

Market oversaturation, anyone?

The same will happen with our western market, if we'll continue to churn out all the vn's in the exact same manner as japanese... and that's something we're already on a good path with. Steam's not a savior; it is inevitably something, which only makes everything worse, encouraging devs to put minimum effort into their works, just so they can have their five minutes of glory; rinse and repeat. I'd say, we're even more at risk here, than the japanese years ago, because our market hasn't matured enough yet.

Continue showing that young lady how "preety" our world is, and you'll surely turn her into a slut, once she grows up

[Nandemonai]

I don't think market oversaturation can entirely explain the downturn.  If my facts are correct (and I haven't been following them closely enough to be sure, so they might not), sales have declined by close to an order of magnitude.  I don't think there's an order of magnitude more games coming out now than there were in the past.  I do remember hearing that the game makers' strategy for dealing with the decline in sales per title was to try to release more games, so I can believe that a market glut has definitely contributed.

If the problem were just market saturation, then the total amount of money spent (total funds spent in Japan in any given month on eroge) would roughly stay the same.  I'm under the impression that the total has instead been declining.  Of course, I could be blowing smoke out of my ass here

[Kaguya]

Copying myself from somewhere else, I'm not really into OELVNs due to generally low-quality artwork, music and the overall lack of voice-acting.

I think that's the problem with them being mostly indie works. They just can't keep up with the quality of commercial releases.

Still, I'd try my hand at a high-budget OELVN with no prejudice, I think. I haven't looked at OELVNs in a while now, though.