Tips on Selling Visual Novels

[redpandastudio]

I made a post about the trends of top selling visual novels on my blog and I thought that people may be interested.

http://confessionsofateenagegamedevelop ... arket.html

It covers top selling genres, mistakes to avoid, the market overall, as well as what to expect from your first visual novel. I wasn't sure where to post this, but I figured this would be the best place for it.

[DaFool]

Thanks, your findings pretty much lines up with what I've discovered or realized. It will help creators whose primary aim is to create something that will be more popular.

But all the more why I'm so dead set on my current project -- since no one else is making anything like it.

[Applegate]

Why isn't Christine Love among the top visual novel developers?

[AxemRed]

To the Moon and Cherry Tree High Comedy Club are not visual novels.

>Most visual novels are failing to get “Greenlit” and have been completely blown off the charts (and not in a good way).
Pretty much nothing is getting greenlit -- where do you gets your information VNs have been "blown off the charts"?

>Winterwolves is the leading visual novel developer (...) releasing 3-4 titles every year
0 visual novels this year

>Sakevisual and Sakura River have also been considerably active in the past year.
by releasing 0 titles?

>your game should be a dating-sim
making it not a VN!

>bishonen (boy pursues girl)
that's bishoujo

>2) It may seem obvious, but your game should not require any keyboard controls. Period!
It's not obvious. Why?

>3) Games with female heroines, dating, stat-raising and RPG elements tend to sell more novels than those that don't.
Perhaps for -your- website, but not in the general sense.

>8) You should concentrate on around a dozen long paths, not dozens of short paths.
3-5 is a normal number of paths. Having "dozens" is insanity.

>22) The dominant art style for visual novels is anime/manga. Do not deviate!
Nonsense, no one minds as long as it looks good.

[Chu-3]

LMAO. I think it depends on your target, really.
I made dupli complicated because I thought people like something more complicated, then cafe, I made it more simple, east tower is kinda more straight forward, with more romance. And among them, East Tower sold best as far. Cafe is the second. LMAO.
but maybe you can say dupli is odd rather than complicated lmao. it might appeal to some people which like something 'different'.

And just for additional info, since I released my game on iphone, I realized that the iphone market player might be really different with PC. I mean, I released Cafe 0 at PC. Then, after around more than half a year, I release the iOS version. I imagined that iOS version won't sell much, since it is not really something new. But then iOS version Cafe, the first month sales is nearly double the number I sold at the first month of PC version.

[redpandastudio]

Why isn't Christine Love among the top visual novel developers?

Thanks for asking. I only listed the top developers by number of titles produced, but did mention that she had a top selling novel. She only has one commercial novel as far as I know. The post doesn't include freeware titles.

[redpandastudio]

@ AxemRed

Thanks for your comment.

Cherry Tree High is more of a sim, but people often include life and dating-sims under the visual novel umbrella and Cherry Tree High has a spot in vndb.org, so I'm pretty comfortable with including it.

To the Moon is a little more difficult to argue, but as a story game, I included it since it seems close enough, though I would agree it's not a visual novel in the traditional sense. It's close enough to the genre to discuss the potential success of games based predominately on text.

Developers that have listed their visual novels on Greenlight have consistently reported their games dropping out of the top 100. Just follow their twitter accounts.

Winterwolves released Heileen 3 this year. I would consider this a visual novel, though I'm sure people would say it's a sim (he actually said that to me already). He's also released a few others, but Loren is mainly an RPG and the yuri version of Spirited Hearts was more of an expansion.

Sakevisual released Winter in Fairbrook just over a year ago, so I'm just a few days off for that, but their current game is on preorder and in testing.

Keyboard controls are accepted by serious gamers, but highly rejected by casual players. If you try to submit your game to a casual portal, they will reject it if you don't have mouse support.

The blog post specifically said for Western success. Import ero games may be male dominated, but western developed games have a larger female audience.

A dozen long paths isn't excessive. 6 major paths, but a good and a bad ending for each ending branch.

I will stand by avoiding from deviating from anime and manga for visual novels. Visual novel gamers are usually anime fans and it's too risky to experiment with other art styles and miss your niche.

[redpandastudio]

LMAO. I think it depends on your target, really.
I made dupli complicated because I thought people like something more complicated, then cafe, I made it more simple, east tower is kinda more straight forward, with more romance. And among them, East Tower sold best as far. Cafe is the second. LMAO.
but maybe you can say dupli is odd rather than complicated lmao. it might appeal to some people which like something 'different'.

And just for additional info, since I released my game on iphone, I realized that the iphone market player might be really different with PC. I mean, I released Cafe 0 at PC. Then, after around more than half a year, I release the iOS version. I imagined that iOS version won't sell much, since it is not really something new. But then iOS version Cafe, the first month sales is nearly double the number I sold at the first month of PC version.

The reason that I wrote not to make it complicated is because I get e-mails every week where people complain that they cannot reach certain paths and it's usually because it's not really clear what they are supposed to do or they just aren't able to do it.

Let them win!

If you really want them to lose, I would suggest spelling out why they lost.

[AxemRed]

>Cherry Tree High has a spot in vndb.org
It's nearly all gameplay on shouldn't be on there, just no-one has bothered to delete it yet.

"games dropping out of the top 100" and "completely blown off the charts (and not in a good way)" are not even close to the same thing.

>Heileen 3
sim
>Loren
RPG
>yuri version of Spirited Hearts
2011

>Sakevisual released Winter in Fairbrook just over a year ago
Last year is not this year. Releasing one title a year isn't "considerably active".

>If you try to submit your game to a casual portal, they will reject it if you don't have mouse support.
Put that in your post then. Also "should not require any keyboard controls" and "should have mouse support" are not the same thing.

>The blog post specifically said for Western success.
MangaGamer and JAST have poofed out of existence? 999 no longer exists?

>A dozen long paths isn't excessive. 6 major paths, but a good and a bad ending for each ending branch.
So if I understand correctly, 12 long paths is no big deal as long as you have only 6 paths. Uhm, what?

>I will stand by avoiding from deviating from anime and manga for visual novels. Visual novel gamers are usually anime fans and it's too risky to experiment with other art styles and miss your niche.
You base this on nothing.

[Anna]

Mh, I kind of disagree with a lot here, but maybe that's because I mainly want to write fun VNs.

People may not like stats, but they are addictive regardless. When you tap into addictive gameplay, you will increase your sales.

Zynga stumbled into this. They found that people were sick of working on their farmville farms, but many people were addicted and continued to build their farms anyway, even though they were complaining that they were tired of doing it.

If I had to choose between selling well + making stuff I hate myself + giving people an addiction vs selling poorly and letting people have honest fun/quit when they want, hand me the second one any day . Personally I even avoid such games because they annoy me, and I can't be the only one.

Also, saying you have to do this is nonsense because there are tons of other ways to make people crave more of your game instead of making them slaves to it (having a good story, good presentation, meaningful choices etc).

1) Build your game with a cross-platform engine for Windows/ Mac/ and Linux. I think Renpy is hard to use, so I really recommend Multimedia Fusion 2 Standard.

Except that Ren'py is more commonly used for VNs, has many people discussing it and willing to help you and you can re-use things other people have coded here? I don't know, but why would MF2 be such a better option? You never state that. You also don't explain why Ren'Py is 'so hard' then.

4) Make your game as interactive as possible. Visual novels are hard sells and kinetic novels are suicide! Your visual novel should include OPTIONAL puzzles, RPG battles, stat-raising, currency, paper doll (dress up), cooking, pets, and other elements. Do not alienate traditional players by making them do mini-games that they may not be good at.

What..? Including a lot of gameplay makes it a game. Of course there's a bigger audience for games, but then why don't you just create a game instead of a VN?

You should concentrate on around a dozen long paths, not dozens of short paths. In Curse of Slate Rock Manor, we had about three dozen short paths, but this ended up being a problem because they were a little too short and required the player to see a few of the same starting branches over and over again.

Suicide. Making three long paths is already hard to accomplish, and more paths does not equal more quality. Good writing equals quality, more just means more work. If you can write a good short path, it will do fine too. Also 'short' and 'long' are subjective, so being more clear on this would be good.

Also, marketing is really important, probably more important than you addressed here and just adding yourself to a VN publisher doesn't mean auto-success because they might not market you well.

[papillon]

I also disagree with a lot of what's in that blog post. I don't think you have access to enough data to provide solid tips. You do know what's sold more copies on your website, and that's useful information to talk about, but it doesn't necessarily generalise.

For example, I can't sell RPG Maker games on my website at all. My customers flat-out won't buy them... from me. But there's a huge market for these things! And many of my customers *do* buy them... but from somewhere other than my site.

It is better to speak from personal experience and make it clear where your information comes from than to try to sound too authoritative and make mistakes.

[Chu-3]

And just for additional info, since I released my game on iphone, I realized that the iphone market player might be really different with PC. I mean, I released Cafe 0 at PC. Then, after around more than half a year, I release the iOS version. I imagined that iOS version won't sell much, since it is not really something new. But then iOS version Cafe, the first month sales is nearly double the number I sold at the first month of PC version.

The reason that I wrote not to make it complicated is because I get e-mails every week where people complain that they cannot reach certain paths and it's usually because it's not really clear what they are supposed to do or they just aren't able to do it.

Let them win!

If you really want them to lose, I would suggest spelling out why they lost.[/quote]

I'm sorry I didn't mention it clear enough. What I meant about complicated here is, like adding more gameplay, like stat raising etc. Some pure VN players would hate it, since they just want to know the story, while others, who want to play more than read might like it. As long as what I have experienced, it seems that mostly people who bought my game is the first type. Of course I want they to win, but even if I thought it's easy, some people might think differently. And just for information, a lot of people asked me if the game has stat raising, since they don't like it.
So I guess it really depends on your audience.

And, if you make like dozen of path, stat raising etc, you would need long time to debug/ test the game. My experience told me that your staffs, people who help you in making the games will be tired to do this. (of course you too). They would need to test every possible paths and there is bigger possibility that "weird bug" will appear later. Of course this kind of games has their advantages too, but it will be seriously hard if you are not specialized in this field ( like me lmao).

And voice acting? People don't care of it? It depends, again.
Lot of people who bought my game said they liked the voices, or buy it because of the voices (maybe because it's voiced in japanese though.)

[Faze]

I can't comment on what sells and what doesn't because I got no experience with the market, but one thing I disagree with is the tone of the tips themselves - that sort of gives off the impression that you are recommending to make a game solely for the purpose of selling as much as possible. One of the suggestions says not to use voice acting in games because it doesn't improve sales, for example, but neglects how even if sales aren't directly affected by it(and I'd disagree with that actually) the game could just flat out be a better game if it had them.

Now, I'm not about to go all hippie on anyone and say that games should be made to express yourself or anything like that because I frankly don't believe in that. But I think you should at the very least try to make a game you like. My reason for believing that is, well, the indie game market is really tough to make a living out of, so there's no good reason to try to push your way into it if you aren't at least having some fun with it, really. If your only goal is to make money then there are much, much easier ways to do that assuming you are a newcomer to the industry. That's my opinion, at least.

[redpandastudio]

@ Anna

This is mainly being approached from people who are serious about making money on their visual novels, so writing a novel for the purpose of making it fun isn't taken into consideration.

I never said that you have to have stats in your game, but you do need to have other game elements. A straight up visual novel is too hard to sell.

Renpy is hard to use. The indenting and the script is far too picky and the overall functionality is extremely limited without the additional use of python. Multimedia Fusion is far more flexible, powerful, and ports to mobile as well as Flash with other export options coming soon.

I'm surprised that you said visual novels are not games. Visual novels are games and should be treated as such. For people that want to make money and make novels, they need to provide some additional functionality for western markets.

Multiple paths is consistently ranked as highly important in users polls, so if you only have three, your game will suffer for lack of replay value.


Marketing is important, but the article was about making the games more than marketing them.

[redpandastudio]

@Papillon

I've sold thousands of games on my site, so I'm comfortable with the amount of data that I'm looking at. Besides that, there's a lot of information available regarding what visual novels are popular and what aren't. On top of that I've retained data on countless polls, etc.

The RPG Maker game buyers have been tapped by Amarnth and Aldorela, so it's hard to sell them anywhere else. I experienced this as well.

I don't think that I made any mistakes, but I did have one typo. I would be happy to argue any point that I made.