Miss Skizzors wrote:I don't like paying for visual novels. I'm just going to come out and say that. I mean, it's not for the same reason as some other people. Some people think that visual novels don't give you as much as a "real game" does, so they aren't willing to pay for what they feel is incomplete. But why would I start developing them if I felt visual novels were incomplete games? As a matter of fact, the reason I don't like to pay for them is because quality is never assured. A demo helps, but they rarely share the word count, and even if they do it's not easy to calculate how long it will personally take you to read it.
This may be somewhat off-topic, but this sentiment doesn't make much sense to be. It's true that quality is never assured, but... isn't that true of anything? I've read the descriptions of books before and thought, "Wow, this book seems awesome!" only to read them and be let down.
Sure, there are ways to try things out for free and not have to commit money to them. Not sure if a book will be any good? Go to the library. A movie or TV show? If you have Netflix (and if my information is correct), you're charged a monthly fee rather than paying for each product individually. A video game? Go over to a friend's place and use their copy (with permission, please don't go around stealing your friends' games cx).
But sometimes, no local library has the book you want, Netflix lets you down, or none of your friends were at all interested in that one game. And that's the point where you have to make that decision on whether you're willing to spend money on that product or not. Are you going to be disappointed sometimes? Yeah, probably. But you'll also find some things that you really enjoy that you would never had experienced had you not gone ahead and bought them.
I could even say the same for how I treat free VNs found on this forum, with my time functioning as a currency of sorts. I tend to be
somewhat picky when downloading games from here since there isn't time to play all of them AND do my homework AND have a social life, etc. etc. etc. So usually, if a game doesn't immediately strike my fancy based on its opening post, I click away from it and don't think about it again. However, maybe the art style for the sprites catches my eye, or I've played and enjoyed games from the same developer(s) before, or people keep on bringing it up in other threads and praising it. So I'll go ahead and give it a chance, and many times I'm pleasantly surprised. This was the case for the one I most recently played,
Midnight's Cafe, which I played because it's by Hidden Masquerade, the creators behind
The Phantom of the Hospital. It wasn't the absolute pinnacle of visual novels and it's not my favorite one ever, but it's quite an experience and it left an impression on me. Of course, time and money are two different things, so this is nowhere near a perfect comparison, but it boils down to the same principal at its core.
Anyway, after that long spiel, I'll get back on topic. There's a mobile app that I recently came across called
Episode, which is basically a whole bunch of episodic VNs, most of them created by other users of the app. (There are some that are put out by the studio, but it seems like they're always partnered with some sort of company, since the two themes seem to be
Mean Girls and ...Demi Lovato, I guess.) How it works in terms of money: The app itself is free. You can choose which story you'd like to read, and the first chapter of each one is free. After that, every new episode costs one pass. You start out with four passes, and after using them, you'll get three more every four hours.
However, they don't stack past that three. So if you don't touch the game for twenty-four hours, you won't have eighteen passes, you'll have three. Plus, you have to watch 2-3 ads before starting each new episode. I don't know whether or not you still have to if you buy the passes, though (I haven't bought any myself).
Besides that, there are also diamonds, which are used to unlike what I guess are more "desirable" choices. These can only be bought. The diamond choices aren't present in most of the stories that I've read, though - I think a lot of the creators dislike them as much as the readers do.
I haven't seen the creation engine yet, but I think that it forces the stories to be linear by nature. I can't really confirm that, but every one that I've played seems to have variation in dialogue and such but not much impact on the actual story. Then again, I haven't gotten to the end of any stories yet, so I could be completely wrong.
I don't hate this business model, since you can theoretically get through the whole thing without paying any money, but having to wait can definitely be annoying, especially if you're reading a story with shorter episodes. And the diamond thing is just irksome, but like I said most of the stories that I've read haven't had any diamond options, so it hasn't been a huge pain in the ass.
