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Ehehehehe I wonder why Robotics;Notes scored relatively poorly compared to Chaos;Child and Steins;Gate (130 votes avg 7.36 vs 1806 votes avg 8.39 and lol 8132 votes avg 9.02 respectively) I'd like to think it's just that most peeps who tried R;N were going off of the high from S;G and then got disappointed, or maybe it's the use of 3d sprites, which can look pretty jank: Worst case scenario it's cuz the plot actually is subpar, god I hope not. We shall see~

I've always been kinda disappointed that visual novels aren't more popular. I thought of different reasons of why that may be and made it into a video, analyzing why.

I dunno how it took you guys so long to realize what has been blatantly obvious for many years already

I think one of the issues is that we have Japan as our only point of reference and we wonder why VNs do not seem to take off the same way they did there. If VNs weren't this big in Japan it would be much easier for us to just accept them as a niche genre and celebrate the limited influence they gathered over the last few years. And in the same way, this JP/West comparison shapes our perception of what should be considered a success. VNs are in many ways struggling now, but if you showed the current state of the market to someone from 2013, they would probably consider it a massive achievement. At the same time, many people hoped that the growth wouldn't slow down the way it did. Why it did and whether these problems are possible to overcome or inherent to the medium are interesting topics for discussion... But I don't think it's in any way justified to say the whole thing failed. It did turn into a viable niche for both localisation companies and small-time devs and I don't think it's going anywhere. It might scale down, evolve, but I would be massively surprised to see it gone. And yeah, I didn't think that last part was about me, but also Fuwanovel as such had quite an interesting role in making the Western VN market a thing, despite suffering one disaster after another. It might be this dying, cynical place now, but it was important for spreading the message and hosting fan translation when they truly mattered. It maybe didn't achieve miracles, but considering how things looked when it started, it's still kind of impressive – and I still mostly blame localizers for the facts it's not even better.

Yeah but I meant what is it a fanfic of? I'm also worried by the fact you used a Naruto mpreg fic as the point of reference.

No, that's definitely not why I quit writing the blog. And well, the point... Depends on why you want to make something. If to want to make good money, making a VN in the West is not the way to go, unless you already have a strong brand that consistently attracts a decently-sized audience. But the whole indie market is suffering from the same plague of over-saturation and most titles released failing to gain traction. The more niche the genre, the bigger the risk and VN are still very niche, but they're not some unique story of failure. The thing is, while I might be somewhat frustrated with how the VN market fails to grow, it's not something I care about too much. If I were on a mission to do something with my blog, it was to show the value of EVNs to other VN fans, not to bring "enlightenment" to the masses. Because VNs staying niche doesn't mean they're going to die out tomorrow, or within a year, or necessarily ever. And I love the formula the same whether it goes mainstream or fails to do so.

You guys kind of underestimate the effort and resources necessary to make a decent VN. Art is really expensive, and voice acting even more expensive if it's meant to not sound like shit. VNs are a really good, cheap tool for people that want to create basic interactive stories for fun or are artists and want to apply their own skills in such a way... But when we get to levels of quality that could be attractive to a mainstream audience the difference between VNs and simple 3D game or other types of 2D games isn't that massive. And I'm not sure I have to remind anyone how huge 2D/retro gaming is right now, so we shouldn't really have to use AAA games as the point of reference... Anyway, I think most arguments people already listed are valid (massive amounts on text in aggressively pushed "kamige", questionable porn, anime aesthetic)... But an important point people forget about is how many, often high-quality VNs don't have mainstream appeal because they defy expectation/do not provide the kind of interactivity Western audience wants. Every time I see Steam users complaining about a VN they played not being a game or having too few choices, it reminds my how either bizarre or dull the idea of interactive literature is for an average gamer... And at the same time, people who are not into games in the first place have few incentives to get into this particular niche of otaku media. And the way the industry handle stuff hardly helps. One genuine perk of VNs over other otaku media is conclusive romance, but for example, we in the West never get the anime tie-in titles that let you pursue a non-canon romance from popular shows. We never see VNs coming to the West with a proper marketing budget either. The result is that you have things like Steins;Gate and Clannad, with legendary-status anime adaptations, being the only VNs with proper reach, alongside gameplay-heavy adventure games such as Danganronpa or Ace Attorney and occasional lowest-common-denominator moe crap like Nekopara... I don't know if I'm right about it, but the longer I look at it, the more botched the whole "bringing VNs into the Western market" feels. Mostly because it relies on the existing fan community nearly in 100% and its ideas of outreach stopped at MoeNovel's delusions of 12-years-old French girls playing Pulltop's waifu games. Either VNs truly have no appeal in the West outside of porn and the small crowd of people looking for romantic stories, or they are selected and marketed in an atrocious way. I would hope it's at least partially the latter, because that still can be remedied to some extent... Like not letting this category on VNDB to forever stay massively neglected.

Very excited for this! Thank you for your commitment and hard work!

Holy cow! I'm just as stoked as everyone else about the translation milestone, but I have to say, I was even more excited to see the new TLC progress! (I believe it was at Licia - 14% for some time?) Awesome!

100%! Can't wait to read!

wow thank for hard work

Congratulations!

Congratulations !! One sheet at 100%, 2 left ^^

Awesome, it's been such a long journey getting there! Congratulations on the milestone!

Congratulation on finishing Eustia's translation, which to say is quite hard to imagine back at last decade. Good luck on TLC and QC and while I agree that it's very nice if you can release the patch at this year, it would be for the best if you take the time to do TLC and QC for better result.

It is done. The translation is officially 100% done Progress will now move on to post-translation, where there's TLC and QC to be done. I'm hoping to finish everything else and release the patch by end 2020 (unlikely, but hey, you never know). If not, then at least get the TLC done by end 2020. So do refer to the TLC tab of the sheet for progress on the TLC. I will save my translation remarks for after the patch is fully released. For now though, rejoice that the translation is done! Yay!

In homage to loam's profound contributions to humanity at large, @leycec Productions presents... Lutris-based Linux installers! My GitHub repository currently hosts experimental Lutris installers for loam's awe-inspiring native Linux port of the official NekoNyan, JAST, and Steam releases for Aokana – including a supplementary installer for the Steam release optionally installing the free-as-in-beer Perfect Edition+ R18 DLC. What's most needed from the Linux visual community now is testing. Please help us get a better idea of the state of these installers by submitting a new issue documenting your installation experience. Installers verified as working will be published to the Lutris page for Aokana. Until verified, these installers will only be available from this repository. Since the initial "AokanaLinuxPatch.zip" archive is both unversioned and inaccessible from automated Lutris installer scripts, I've also taken the liberty of hosting that zipfile at this repository as a GitHub Release named "aokana-linux_0.0.1.zip". If that displeases you greatly, loam, just let me know and I'll make everything right again. Also, would you like to be added as a repository maintainer? I'd be delighted to give you push access. If you're not already hosting your Unity changeset somewhere, this could be the perfect place. If you are already hosting those changes somewhere, just let me know the URL and I'll link to you straight away. Thanks for all the hard-working volunteerism! You have my vote for the next NekoNyan engineering hire.