NotCliche

From: Maikuro -Ore ga Watashi de Boku ga Atashi de-

The eroge industry is undoubtedly one of bigger sector of the Japanese gaming market. Everywhere you go, you’ll probably hear or seen of at least one or more visual novel titles (these aren’t exactly classified as eroge), so it’s a given for the eroge titles.

However, despite the tremendous size of the eroge market, it’s not exactly the main focus in the whole of the Japanese gaming industry. Famous games such as jRPG and some survival horrors in Japan usually takes the spotlight, but even now, game companies are scaling down on their projects, opting to go for tried-and-true methods of making games, rarely going for new ideas these days. And of course, if the big companies are being affected by this, then the visual novel or eroge industry are definitely no stranger to this kind of scaling down of projects.

Recently interviewed by Siliconera was a Japanese eroge marketing distributor, who had frankly revealed some pretty interesting, yet somewhat disturbing facts about eroges, as well as the dim future that awaits it.

From: Kiss x Lord x Darjeeling

Speaking on the topic of eroge, the distributor feels that the niche world of adult bishoujo games and visual novels is a “flooded market”, and it would be extremely difficult for titles these days to be catching the eyes of the consumers. While certainly, there are series that would be popular enough to get an anime adaptation or something like that, but that’s just an extremely small portion in the otherwise extremely large market of eroge.

Due to that, many companies would rather stick to a small portions of true-and-true methods that would guarantee to bring them success. That will at least guarantee their consumers that they aren’t stepping on a landmine (not enjoying the game at all). After all, consumers would want to follow the adventures of characters that they do know, instead of taking the effort to know all the characters all over again in yet another game. Not only that, consumers would want to go for a certain kind of interest (or fetish), and this would ultimately reduce the variety of games available in the market.

Touka from Utawarerumono.

However, this does not mean that game companies aren’t trying out new things. Some of such games out there incorporate some role-playing element into the game, and had seen huge successes. Games such as Utawarerumono is considered extremely successful by incorporating both visual novel and RPG elements into one neat package. But still, in the end, majority of the games with the prettiest characters in it would probably fetch a better sales volume than the other which might have a better storyline.

Other than the presentation of the game, there’s also the cost factor. According to the distributor, majority of the games in the visual novel and eroge industry would translate to nearly USD$100 (no idea how he calculated that, limited editions, perhaps?) and that’s extremely expensive when you put it next to a western game which boasts great multiplayer and some other nifty features you can do. Of course, there are several alternative routes the player can go through, but once completed, the player can’t really get anything more out the game. And recently, it looks like game companies are releasing shorter games in a shorter timeframe, sometimes as fast as 3 months per game . Looks like some of the companies are going for the “quantity over quality” kind of mentality now…

It may be a happy ending in a game, but is it truly a happy ending?

All in all though, the distributor concludes that the visual novel and eroge industry is currently shrinking and it looks like there’s no hope of it ever opening up again. The marketing techniques employed is at it’s limit, and the market is pretty much at it’s limit too. All that’s left now is for companies and developers to eat into each other’s profits, be it in the anime, gaming, visual novel or even eroge industry, seeing that it’s the same consumers that patronizes these industry. In time to come, competition will only get fiercer, and as more developers gets themselves into the industry, the amount of profit that goes about will just get lesser and lesser.

There’s no telling how the visual novel or eroge industry will do in the near future, but for now, it’s definitely no good news.

For a full read on the interview, you may want to drop by Siliconera.

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