Anonymous asked:

How do you think the VN playerbase has changed since you started playing VNs? My impression is that VNs are now a lot more mainstream than they were 20 years ago, but on average also a lot less unique/ambitious as they used to be. Is the industry really stagnating, or are my rose tinted glasses getting the better of me?

I think you can categorize it in four broad phases:

1. Visual novels as a concept are largely unknown in the West. Most of the games that get translated are eroge, but they're termed "dating sims" because the localizers don't know how to sell people on them. There isn't a culture around them yet, apart from the common bond of wanting to ejaculate to cartoon characters.
2. Once the concept is more established, serious games begin to get translated more frequently, leading to a weeaboo fanbase and culture. The players care about the stories being told, and are consequently adamant about things like censorship, leading to controversies with games like Kazoku Keikaku.
3. Tumblr finds out about VNs, and infests the scene with their notorious lack of taste. Hipsters realize that they can make low-effort crap in RenPy, and call themselves game developers for it. The existing culture, which is analogous to the culture surrounding anime, starts getting eaten away by this new one, which is more akin to the culture surrounding modern-day American cartoons. There are more and more little games which amount to self-insert quasi-autobiographies about how hard it is to come out as gay, or things like that.
4. Steam becomes the go-to store for visual novels. Its accessibility allows more people to be exposed to VNs of both styles. The weeaboo culture is still there, but it's no longer as adamant about things like censorship—or if it is, there's nothing they can do about it. Steam is king, its rules are arbitrary, and everyone does whatever they need to to get their game on it. The market gets flooded not only with low-effort indie crap, but also high-effort indie crap like Stray Gods and Goodbye Volcano High. There's more shovelware to wade through than the fucking Wii catalogue. The newer culture is more entrenched, and there is some crossover, making it difficult or impossible for the original culture to regain control, or even segregate itself cleanly from the new one.

In addition to this, there's also the console situation in the East, where more VNs find themselves on platforms like the Switch, with similar consequences to Steam. I don't pay enough attention to serious VNs anymore to know the truth about that, but I get the impression that it's led to some watering down and genericizing of the medium—e.g., the Tsukihime remake, which is incomplete, all-ages, and makes certain characters look more like generic anime girls than the original.