I was logging onto steam and realized wow...there are a ton of visual novels on there now. First, that made me glad there was so many (hey more fans of visual novels right) but then I wondered, how does this affect the typical visual novel maker? How crowded is the market? Is it good in that there are more fans or is it actually far worse since now everyone is over-crowded (spam), its really difficult to get any attention whatsoever unless you have a really controversial visual novel or something that surprisingly taps into the vein of the mainstream?
Just curious and was hopeful people could chip in their thoughts.
I noticed the same thing, especially on Kickstarter: as I write this, there are 11 visual novels trying to get funded at the same time. For the last couple of years some EVN even become really successful, like Monster Prom, VA-11 Hall-A or Dream Daddy to name a few; Visual Novel are quite popular on Steam, and I don't think it was imaginable ten years ago.
So yeah, the market as changed; but I stay optimistic.
I have no experience in making commercial Visual Novel, but the Visual Novel genre is by design very diverse: You have theme from romance (who have many variations) to horror, realistic to fantasy setting, serious tone to goofy one, Japanese to western style...
My point is, you can't please everyone just because you are a Visual Novel. It's not enough, because the offer is larger than ever. However, there are a lot of different VN players who expect different things, and you can appeal to them.
The difficult part is to reach out to the right players, and that's what marketing is about (because game don't sell by itself).
TD;DR: The market is bigger than ever, but individual niche and sub-genre may still have some space for you.