Well first I believe casual expands beyond the so-called 'portals.' Those portals have become HO havens, they don't represent casual players like they once did. Instead they are niche (due to a number of factors, but largely themselves).
When I first got to Reflexive I did some audience analysis through survey's and the like, and something that came up consistently was that our players all loved reading. It was by far the most popular pass-time. When you look at how well the Kindle has done or the focus on companies trying to make it easier to get books, be they Apple or Google, it is clear that reading is not slowing down in popularity.
The question really is about gaming with stories. Do people want to read?
The rule has always been 'no.'
And so game-makers have selected for that over and over to the point that many intelligent people want nothing to do with games which come across like a baby's toy in the terms of intellectual stimulation.
With VN-based games you can do what games do best - allow players to manipulate the world - with what stories do best - engage the mind. For the right crowd, a crowd I think is huge, they are perfect. The difficulty is finding the crowd.
...and that may be an insurmountable difficulty.
Or it may be that with games moving to places like the Kindle, that VN-based games are just about to hit their heyday in becoming mainstream entertainment.
On the personal side, I find the set-up of many VN-based games to be wholly addictive. I really think the genre is just waiting to be discovered, and that once it is, people will find they enjoy reading. In my user testing on M&M, I had a consistent response: "At first I was skipping through some of the text, but then when I realized it was all text, I really got into it." I heard it over and over. It made me realize that one of the reasons players hate text in most games is b/c it gets in the way of playing the game. VN games don't have that issue, in fact, you could see them as the resolution.
Who knows really, but I think we are on the cusp of a breakthrough.
I'm also interested to see how RenPy can grown on Android (though Android is really a struggle in terms of compatibility across devices, and you have to have [ABSOLUTE MUST] positive reviews to get any traction in the download charts - which means lots of time and updates to get it all right). With Airport Mania now doing well on Android, it's been amazing to me how much work it has taken. We released in December, and have done 13 updates since then! We still have a list of issues, but we've focused on taking down the big ones based on user reviews and have seen HUGE increases in downloads. The first week Airport Mania was on Android I was really discouraged by the numbers, but time, work, and perseverance have totally changed my opinion!
As the world moves to Android Tablet's it potentially opens up more of a world to VN stuff to have RenPy there, though I think it will be really challenging to get it all working perfectly. Still, I do believe it is a part of the future of VN. It's awesome RenPy has been working to put itself in so many places
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I also know Wadjet had complaints from casual players about the game he made for Playfirst (the emerald city) because was an adventure with too much texts.
