When I told my friend I was going to buy a com­mer­cial OELVN to check it out, the response was “Why would you do that!?”

Even west­ern fans of Japan­ese visual nov­els often frown upon the OELVN (Orig­i­nal Eng­lish Lan­guage Visual Novel) com­mu­nity. Pro­duc­tion qual­i­ties are always a con­cern, as the ama­teur teams formed by west­ern enthu­si­asts sim­ply have no chance of com­pet­ing against fan-translated famous Japan­ese visual novel titles. But there’s always a start— the Key staffers’ first big title, ONE, cer­tainly had nei­ther good art­work nor detailed sto­ry­writ­ing, even com­pared to ani­ma­tion from back then. But just as the early visual nov­els offered some­thing dif­fer­ent from the ani­manga medium, OELVNs have their own appeal. Yet as far as I can tell, OELVN groups haven’t made much progress at all in expand­ing over the recent years, espe­cially in com­par­i­son to vis­nov local­iza­tion com­pa­nies like Man­gagamers.

It’s not merely a ‘lack of vis­nov audi­ence in the west’ either. Yes, Eng­lish fans of visual nov­els are still rare, but if the pace in trans­la­tion groups is any indi­ca­tion (Yan­dere trans­la­tions announced Aiyoku no Eus­tia project just 4 months after its Japan­ese release!), it’s cer­tainly been grow­ing by leaps and bounds. Qual­ity isn’t the biggest hur­dle either: the short free­ware Re:Alistair was quite a hit amongst every­one with the slight­est inter­est in otome games. So what’s the biggest prob­lem then? — prob­a­bly still cost vs reputation.

The com­mer­cial OELVN, Always Remem­ber Me, is an otome dating-sim game fea­tur­ing Amy, a col­lege girl and writer-to-be who was going through a life cri­sis after get­ting involved in a traf­fic acci­dent: her boyfriend Aaron had been hit try­ing to pro­tect her and woke up in the hos­pi­tal with no mem­o­ries of their rela­tion­ship. Despite my lack of expe­ri­ence and inter­est in most dating-sims (except the Per­sona JRPG series’ social link sys­tem), I found the game to be quite fun to play. The game was inter­ac­tive, where you chose from numer­ous activ­i­ties for each time period of each day in order to develop Amy’s per­sonal skills and her rela­tion­ships. It had a lov­able art style with soft tex­tures, light shad­ows, and a watercolor-esque feel (main rea­son I checked it out~). The script was short yet light and sweet. The event CGs num­bered less than a dozen, but each of them han­dled with excel­lent tran­si­tions and focus pan­ning. The game even had an orig­i­nal sound­track with a great OP (Remem­ber Me) per­formed by Cristina Vee. It may not be quite com­pet­i­tive with its Japan­ese equiv­a­lents yet, but the pol­ish that went into this game cer­tainly shows that we’re get­ting there~ ^o^

How­ever, there was just one prob­lem with it— the game costs $20, the most com­mon price you see for com­mer­cial OELVNs.

It’s really not much; actu­ally it’s much lower than what JVNs cost these days. But when you com­pare that to the cheap indie games being sold through Xbox live and Steam, it is. Local­ized visual novel ele­ment games like Recettear (also $20) are get­ting com­mon, and they usu­ally offer much higher pro­duc­tion qual­i­ties and longer playa­bil­ity, not to men­tion bet­ter estab­lished fan­bases. If I had only $20 on my gam­ing bud­get this month, I’d prob­a­bly hold off on this…

Now, the con­cept of a loss leader is quite well known, par­tic­u­larly in indie games and pub­lish­ing. Xbox live devel­op­ers and Kin­dle e-book writ­ers often release games and books for as lit­tle as under $3; many of them do pre­cisely this in order to get their prod­ucts, and their names, out there. The loss lead might not gain much profit, but the fan­base earned usu­ally makes it worth­while in the long run. For a com­mu­nity as small as the OELVN one, any expan­sion in fan­base also expands the com­mu­nity and its mar­ket as a whole— tak­ing a slice of the pie from the rapidly expand­ing ani­manga fan­base out there.

So I talked to the cre­ators of Always Remem­ber Me about a lower dis­tri­b­u­tion price. To many of my friends, $5 or even $10 could be seen as a ‘throw­away’ amount, a price they’re will­ing to spend to trial a game with poten­tial. But $20 is cer­tainly over that. With the right mar­ket­ing, an OELVN that peo­ple wouldn’t hes­i­tate much to pay for should be able to pull many more cus­tomers over time, and some of these cus­tomers will hope­fully stick around for other prod­ucts from the com­pany and the com­mu­nity, right? But, the response that came swift and sim­ple was: “($20) is the one that gives best return”.

Yes, on that game. But what about the long run?

Well, in the end, I’m not an entre­pre­neur, so these are just some thoughts of mine as a cus­tomer of the mar­ket; and to Win­ter­wolves’ credit: the demo release + online reg­is­tra­tion pur­chase sys­tem they set up was an awe­some idea~

Pos­si­bly Related Posts

• Most Unortho­dox Shoujo I’ve Seen Yet (Crim­son Empire)
• G-Senjou No Maou Visual Novel Review
• 12 Days of Anime #1: Seven Years Of Hell For A Hug And A Greet­ing (Sharin no Kuni)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011 at 18:02 and is filed under Visual Novels. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.